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THE 



INFLUENCE OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
ON SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE, 



BEING THE 



HARNESS PRIZE ESSAY FOR THE YEAR ij 



A. W. VERITY, B.A. 

SCHOLAR OF TRINITY COLLEGE. 




MACMILLAN AND BOWES. 

1886 



1.^^-!>-'f 



**i^ S JM 



^ >• ^'iS- 



PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS, 
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 



NOTE. 

In writing the following Essay I have consulted the 
usual authorities, two of whom ought perhaps to be 
particularised. Mr Bullen's Introduction to his edition 
of Mavlozve contains, I imagine, every fragment of 
fact connected with the poet's life and works that has 
been discovered, together with some careful criticism ; 
I have laid him very largely under contribution. In 
the account of the rise of blank verse I have followed 
Mr Symonds, who in his Shaksperes Predecessors, in 
three essays appended to his Sketches and Studies in 
Italy, and in an article in the CornJdll Magazine 
(Vol. XV.) has discussed the question very fully. To 
each of these writers my obligations are almost too 
obvious to need acknowledgement. For the rest, the 
terms under which the prize was awarded required 
that the successful essay should be printed ; this, of 
course, is my sole reason for publishing what otherwise 
would have sought some friendly fireplace. 



THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
ON SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 



ScHLEGEL ill his Dramatic Literature devotes a 
paragraph of ten Hnes to Christopher Marlowe ; after 
mentioning Lyly, he says, ' Marlowe possessed more 
real talent and was in a better way. He handled the 
history of Edward the Second with very little art it is 
true, but with a certain truth and simplicity, so that in 
many scenes he does not fail to produce a pathetic 
effect. His verses are flowing but without energy : 
how Ben Jonson could come to use the expression 
" Marlowe's mighty line " is more than I conceive.' 
As an expression of Schlegel's own opinion the quo- 
tation is not very significant ; he wrote, as Mr 
Swinburne suggests, the epitaph of his criticism in 
the egregious statement that The Ycn^ksJiire Tragedy, 
Thomas, Lord Croimvell, and Sir John Oldcastle 
were not only written by Shakspere — of that there 
could be no doubt in the mind Schlegelian — but 
V. I 



MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 



should really be classed amongst the poet's ' best and 
maturest works.' At the time, however, when his 
remarkable dictum on Marlowe was given to the 
world Schlegel was regarded as a great Shaksperian 
critic, and that he should have dismissed the author 
of Tambiirlaine with a few lines of benevolent con- 
tempt is, I think, not a little significant. It is typical 
of the strange ignorance which existed even beyond 
the beginning of this century concerning some of the 
greatest of our Elizabethan dramatists. The method 
of comparative criticism was practically ignored. 
Shakspere was treated as an isolated phenomenon, 
independent of the contemporaries above whom he 
towered ; they were lost in his shadow and met with 
the barest recognition, or none at all. It never struck 
the older commentators and critics that Shakspere 
must have been profoundly influenced — at any rate 
at the outset of his career — by the literary activity of 
the dramatists round him, and yet we may be pretty 
sure that there were a thousand influences moulding 
the genius of the poet from the day when he may 
have seen the 'Queen's Players' at Stratford in 1587 
to the day when he finished his share in Henry VIII. 
and gave up writing altogether. And of these in- 
fluences none surely could exceed the effect which 
the works of his contemporaries must have had on 
his style and method, and of these contemporaries 
who greater than Christopher Marlowe.^ To appreciate 
the development of Shakspere's genius and art we 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 



must see him affected by the example now of one 
dramatist, now of another. It is one great family, 
and we must study their works in common, precisely 
as an artist deals with a school of painters. There 
are many points of contact between the different 
members ; there is likewise much diversity. Special 
characteristics are represented by special writers, and 
all are summed up in Shakspere, the central sun, so 
to speak, of which the others are but partial reflec- 
tions. 

To insist on this is to insist on what has become 
the merest truism — ' I sing the Obsolete ' — but it is a 
doctrine on which proper stress was never laid until 
Coleridge', Hazlitt and Lamb made the great dis- 
covery that other writers besides Shakspere had lived 
in what is familiarly called the Elizabethan era. 
During the eighteenth century, of course, it was 
hardly probable that our old dramatists would receive 
much attention. Shakspere himself had fallen on 
evil days — and evil editors. The public rested secure 
under the benevolent despotism of the rhymed 
couplet, the critics raised their ceaseless Ave Iniperator 

^ Even Coleridge barely alludes to Marlowe in his Lectures, while 
Scott in his essay on the drama has the following passage : ' The 
English stage might be considered equally without rule and without 
model when Shakspeare arose... He followed the path which a nameless 
crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him. Nothing went before 
Shakspeare, which in any respect was fit to fix and stamp the character 
of a national drama.' How wide of the mark this criticism is my essay 
will attempt to show. 



i' 



MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 



to 'one Boileau,' and the poets — well, Keats has 
described them for us : 

' A schism 
Nurtured by foppeiy and barbarism 
Made great Apollo blush for this his land. 
Men were thought wise who could not understand 
■ His glories ; with a puling infant force 
They swayed about upon a rocking-horse, 
And thought it Pegasus' — 

Pope felt no scruples in emending the text of 
Shakspere much as a German editor handles the text 
of Sophocles. Colley Gibber and others laid sacri- 
legious hands on some of the plays and ' adapted ' 
them ; the public applauded, and even the great 
Garrick was content to keep in his acting versions 
what Lamb rightly calls the ' ribald trash ' of Tate 
and his fellow-workers. Johnson himself in editing 
Shakspere scarcely took the trouble to open the 
works of Shakspere's contemporaries. But it is super- 
fluous to multiply instances. The force of the classical 
movement lasted a long time, and while it remained 
it was not unlikely that the lesser dramatists, at any 
rate, of Elizabeth's reign would continue under a 
cloud. And this was so until towards the end of the 
century. Then interest in forgotten works began to 
revive. In 1773 Hawkins brought out his valuable 
work, The Origin of the English Drama; in 1779 
Steevens reprinted a volume of the old Chronicle 
plays ; in the next year a still greater advance was 
made with the issue of Dodsley's admirable Collec- 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 5 

tion. The preface indeed to the last-mentioned 
work is not a Httle instructive. The editor seems to 
have felt that his publication of forgotten pieces 
needed some apology, and accordingly he begins 
with the remark — ' Our ancient dramatic writers have 
suffered a very long and, some few excepted, a very 
general neglect,' a state of things for which he endea- 
vours — not very successfully — to account. Amongst 
the ' some few ' to whom he alludes Christopher 
Marlowe certainly can not be included. It was not 
till 1826 that he was edited at all, and then the duty 
fell to an editor who contested his claims to the 
authorship of Tamburlaine. But if, roughly speaking, 
up till 1820 Marlowe was neglected, assuredly since 
then his merits — and they are great — have been 
freely recognised. At least three admirable editions^ 
of his works have been published, besides innumer- 
able essays dealing with various aspects of his genius. 
Praise has been awarded him unstintingly ; indeed it 
may be questioned whether the rhapsodies of en- 
thusiastic admirers have not been as great an injury 
to his name as was the neglect of earlier critics. Mr 
Swinburne has exhausted the resources of his perfervid 
rhetoric in doing justice — perhaps something more 
than justice — alike to Marlowe's own merits as a 
writer, and to the influence which he exercised on his 

^ Those of Dyce, Cunningham and Bullen. To these may be added 
editions of separate plays, amongst which The Tragical History of Dr 
FaitstHs, edited by Professor Wagner, as also by Professor Ward, and 
Edward II. by Mr Fleay, may be specially mentioned. 



MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 



still greater successor; Mr Symonds has echoed these 
praises in a lower key, and recently Mr Symonds has 
been followed by Mr Bullen. The field in fact has 
been gleaned ; every fragment of fact has long 
since been garnered, and scarcely a single point of 
contact between Shakspere and Marlowe remains 
uninvestigated. One cannot in bringing forward the 
humblest view confidently exclaim with Touchstone, 
' An ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own.' Mr Leslie 
Stephen complains somewhere of the hard lot which 
condemns essayists in general to utter paradoxes or 
platitudes — 'the difficulty of saying anything new' is 
so overwhelming ; and the difficulty is complicated a 
thousandfold when Shakspere is the subject. The 
ordinary writer has at the outset two alternatives, and 
practically only two: he may determine to be eccentric, 
and unhesitatingly ascribe, say, the whole of Titus 
Andronicus to Shakspere, in the fond hope of being 
thought original, or he may content himself with 
saying over again what has been said before, and 
doubtless said better. The latter seems to me the 
preferable course ; hence most of this essay (where 
right) will have been seen before, and a comprehensive 
application of Mr Puff's ingenious theory of coinci- 
dences will be quite essential throughout. 

Perhaps before passing to the narrower question 
of Marlowe's immediate connection with Shakspere 
it may be well to touch, first, on the position of the 
English stage when Marlowe appeared before the 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 



world as a playwright ; secondly, on the peculiar 
character of his dramas judged on their own merits ; 
it will then be possible to appreciate more exactly 
the influence he exercised on his great successor. 

When Christopher Marlowe left Cambridge, ' a 
boy in years, a man in genius, and a god in ambition,' 
and coming up to London threw in his lot with the 
dramatists of the day, everything pointed to the 
development of a great national stage. England had 
passed through one of those crises that occurring 
rarely in the history of a people must profoundly 
affect its fortunes, for good or for evil. Such crises may 
leave behind them a course of wreck and ruin, or 
they may produce opposite results. They may rouse 
and stimulate a nation to a sense of power and 
strength hitherto undreamed of; they may kindle an 
enthusiasm which must find vent, partly in action, 
partly in artistic expression. It is impossible to 
determine the laws which at such moments guide men 
in their unconscious choice of a method of self-revela- 
tion : we can only appeal to the past and be governed 
by its teaching, and in the case of the drama ex- 
perience shows us at least one thing. Great dramas 
have arisen in different countries under different cir- 
cumstances to which their various divergences may be 
traced, but amid all external differences one vital 
condition has always been observed — a great national 
stage has never been developed in any country in a 
period of national stagnation. The sine-qua-non of a 



MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 



national dramatic literature is national life and 
activity ; energy of thought and energy of deed go 
side by side. It is only at some turning-point in its 
fortunes, when dangers have been triumphantly sur- 
mounted and a new era of strength and prosperity is 
opening out before it, that a people can produce great 
dramatists. Men have lived, have saved themselves 
by action, and it is to the stage that they instinctively 
turn as capable, in a degree unattainable by any other 
art, of giving definite artistic expression to their pas- 
sionate energy ; for the central idea of the stage is man 
in action, and thence comes the strength of its appeal. 
A great crisis, then, may not necessarily call into 
being a great national stage, but without the former 
history seems to show that the latter is impossible, 
and through such a crisis the England of Elizabeth 
had assuredly passed in its struggle with Spain. 
There was, too, activity of thought. It was part of 
the widespread Renaissance spirit, of that strange 
quickening of latent and well-nigh forgotten powers. 
On every side new forces were at work. The old 
order was changing ; the spell was broken ; Europe 
awoke from its long, long dream, and the nations 
again were young, and strong, and stirred with 
passion. In all directions the new learning began to 
spread, and it was not likely that this country would 
remain unaffected by the general movement. Since 
the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. its history 
had been one long struggle. It was not till the ac- 



SHAA'SPEFE'S EARLIER STYLE. 



cession of EHzabeth that men enjoyed anything Hke 
poHtical security ; then they reaped the fruit of long 
efforts. Rehgion was free. The great Reformation 
movement had been successful; the Bible could be in 
every man's hands. It was a time of transition, when 
the miserable despotism of Rome was a thing of the 
past and the equally oppressive rule of Puritan dogma 
was still undreamt of And if there was freedom in 
religion there was likewise comparative political free- 
dom. Men looked back on the absolutism of Henry 
VI 11., they remembered the reign of terror established 
by Mary, and they felt themselves fortunate in being 
under the rule of a Queen like Elizabeth. There 
were, too, other causes favourable to the rise of the 
stage. There were masses of local traditions that had 
never been employed for literary purposes, thoroughly 
national ballads like the Robin Hood cycle still un- 
touched. It remained for some dramatist to draw on 
the every-day working life of the country people for 
inspiration, to introduce on the stage the atmosphere 
of rural England, to paint such scenes as those which 
Shakspere has given us in the fourth act of The Wmtcrs 
Tale. Again, there was the wealth of foreign literature, 
especially Italian, that poured into England. Trans- 
lations of foreign books abounded ; the playwright 
was not put to the trouble of inventing his plots ; the 
bookstalls of London were covered with Italian^ 

^ Thus Ascham's Schoolmaster — printed, we may remember, in 
1579 — is full of references to the influx of Italian books into England. 



10 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

novels from which to borrow. Indeed the connection 
between England and the Continent was one more 
proof of the activity of the time. London itself, the 
heart and brain of the nation, was a vast cosmopolitan 
centre ; men of all nationalities were to be seen in the 
streets. It was an age of discovery and enterprise, 
and commerce of every kind was centred in the 
great capital, then, it may be remembered, not too 
unwieldy to be moved by something akin to a 
general public opinion. There is at least one other 
point that deserves to be noticed — men were uncritical ; 
they did not at every turn call in question the drama- 
tist's accuracy. When the Poet Laureate in his last 
play, Becket, rearranged his materials to heighten the 
dramatic interest, he was very generally condemned 
for departing from history, and naturally, for the 
modern, the critical, spirit craves for fidelity, for truth 
even at the expense of artistic effect. It was not so 
with an Elizabethan audience. They asked to be 
amused, nothing more. They did not condemn 
RicJiard III., because Richard is made to woo the 
widow of the dead prince, Edward. The episode 
added to the stage-effect ; it gave another aspect of 
Richard's heartlessness, and dramatically that was 
its justification. Again, men were credulous. Romance 
was in the air. They were ready to accept wonderful 
legends with a half child-like complacency and joy. 
A modern statesman once laughingly excused his 
ignorance of a new theory that had been mentioned 



SHAKSrERE'S EARLIER STYLE. II 

in his presence, on the ground that he was ' born in 
the pre-scientific period.' Shakspere and his fellow 
workers were in much the same position, and perhaps 
it is well that they were. There may be something 
after all in Macaulay's old paradox that imagination 
declines as civilization advances. The critical spirit 
will have nothing to say to the popular legends, the 
illogical superstitions which supply the mind of a 
Walter Scott with the most sympathetic material on 
which to work. Science dispels the thousand and 
one myths that cluster round mountain and forest 
and river. 

Do not all charms fly 
At the mere touch of cold philosophy? 
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven : 
We know her woof, her texture; she is given 
In the dull catalogue of common things. 
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, 
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine — 
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made 
The tender person'd Lamia melt into a shade. 

Unfortunately not only the angel's wings are 
clipped but — it is infinitely more important — the 
dramatist's too. Thus a modern playwright would 
be very shy of introducing into his work a device like 
that of the magic crystal employed by Greene in 
Ftnar Bacon and Friar Bnngay with the quaintest 
possible effect, and yet it is just the scene where the 
prince looks into the 'glass prospective,' and watches 
the love-making of Margaret — one of Greene's best 



12 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

characters — and Lacy, that we care for most ; it is all 
delightfully incongruous, with the prince's running 
commentary on the unconscious lovers. Greene could 
introduce such an incident because at a time when 
magic in all its branches was believed in many of the 
spectators would not find the crystal so ridiculous. 
But on the modern stage the whole piece would be 
impossible ; the advice of the Friar — 'sit still, my 
lord, and mark the comedy' — would scarcely be 
followed. Again, with what terrible realism does 
Marlowe treat the Faust legend. There is not a 
shred of symbolism in the play ; from first to last it is 
charged with the simplicity that attaches to everyday 
life, for the supernatural in that age of universal super- 
stition was hardly supernatural at all. People believed 
— probably Marlowe did himself — that the devil had 
actually carried off the great wizard to a crude accom- 
paniment of stage-thunder and evil angels, and ac- 
cordingly we move throughout in the atmosphere of 
accepted facts. There is no philosophy to vex us — 
no hidden meaning to be read between the lines. 
Helena and Faustus meet, and we forget all about the 
union of the classical and the mediaeval which in the 
history of literature the incident is taken by Goethe 
to represent. Helena, as Vernon Lee says, is only some 
lovely mediaeval lady, 

'divinely tall 
And most divinely fair ; ' 

some Galataea-like statue into which the poet ha'" 



SHAA'SFERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 13 

breathed the breath of life ; what she is in the old 
Faust-book that she remains in Marlowe's play. She 
moves across the stage — she is passing beautiful — and 
she means nothing. And Marlowe could handle the 
legend with this nakedness of detail, this materialising 
directness, because to him and to his audience the 
whole story was not in the least degree out of the 
way. Was it not all duly set forth in the famous 
Historia von D. Johann Faiisten, deni zvcitbescJircytcn 
Zaiibcrer und ScJnvartzkiinstler? and if, as the shepherd 
opines in The Winter' s Tale, we may be sure that a 
ballad in print is and must be true, who would hint 
or hesitate a doubt against the HistoiHe, neivly im- 
printed and in convenient places imperfect matter 
amended, which the unknown 'P. F. Gent' (the Ollen- 
dorf of the age) kindly translated for the benefit of 
his fellow-countrymen .'' 

These, and other causes that might be mentioned, 
pointed to the rise of a drama that should express 
with the utmost imaginative fulness and force the 
tendencies of the time. It was essential to the success 
of such a movement that it should be in the v/idest 
sense representative : to be identified with any par- . 
ticular school meant comparative failure. - It could 
not afibrd to court the patronage of the queen and of 
the nobles, any more than it dared submit to the 
pedantry of scholars. It had to deal with all aspects 
of life; it had to appeal directly to the people at large, 
and its style was bound to be romantic. That such a 



14 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

drama did eventually spring up is a matter of history; 
that it did not exist in 1587, when' Tavibm'laine was, 
in all probability, first acted, is, I think, equally a 
matter of history. On the contrary, the stage was 
then 'encumbered with a litter of rude, rhyming 
fa'-ces and tragedies.' Fortunately of these plays we 
have some specimens, and if we compare them with 
the first forms of tragedy and comedy, and with the 
still earlier religious plays, we shall see that, up to 
1587, the development of the stage had been slow, 
but regular. As in all countries, its origin had been 
religious. To begin with there were the miracle- 
plays, which lasted to (about) the middle of the 
fifteenth century. Originally, no doubt, they formed 
part of the services of the Church, as a simple and 
effective means of instructing the unlettered laity. 
They were written and acted by clergymen, and it 
was not till some time after their introduction, which 
dates from the end of the eleventh century, that the 
Trade-Companies performed them annually, as at 
Chester, at their own expense. As was to be ex- 
pected these plays dealt entirely with sacred^ subjects, 
with the lives of saints, or stories from the Old and 
New Testaments. The dramatis personae, it is worth 
remembering, were real characters. In the reign of 
Henry VI. these Miracles were in part supplanted by 
the Moral Plays, or it might perhaps be more correct 

^ Cf. Mr Bnllen's Introduction, I. pp. xvi — xviii. 

^ Cf. Collier, History of Dramatic Poetry, Vol. II. 123. 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. I 5 

to say that the former developed by a natural process 
into the latter, the transition being marked by the in- 
troduction into the Miracles of allegorical characters. 
'The change/ says Collier (ll. 259), 'was designed to 
give Miracle Plays a degree of attraction they would 
not have possessed, if year after year they had 1 "en 
repeated to the same audiences precisely in the same 
form.' As a matter of fact, however, the innovation 
was fatal to the Miracles. Once the change had been 
made these allegorical characters became more nume- 
rous, the action of the piece was impeded, and as the 
new figures were incompatible with the old the latter 
gradually fell into the background, so that ' in process 
of time what was originally intended to be a poetical 
embellishment became a new species of theatrical ex- 
hibition, unconnected with history.' Doubtless these 
Moral Plays were infinitely more interesting than the 
old pieces, which were merely sermons in disguise. 
The fable or plot became more elaborate, the charac- 
ters more life-like and tangible. Moreover they had 
an extraneous interest; they served as satires on con- 
temporary life. The Church was repeatedly the object 
of their attacks, indeed we gather from them a clear 
idea of the revolution of thought which changed the 
England of Henry VL into the England of Elizabeth. 
Mediaevalism dies out, and we see the gradual growth 
of the Reformation doctrines, and later of the Renais- 
sance. It was as satirical pieces covertly alluding to 
popular prejudices and current events that these 



1 6 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

Moral Plays continued to be acted up to the end of 
the 1 6th century, although their performance after 
1570 was comparatively rare. Indeed they did not 
retain their undisputed sway later than 1520. Then 
came, in Heywood's Interhidcs^ the first step towards 
a regular comedy. These Interludes — the name is 
appropriately chosen — were distinct from the Mira- 
cles and from the Moralities, bridging, as it were, the 
interval that separated the latter from the earliest 
form of comedy as given in Roister-Doister. Of one 
of these pieces — printed somewhere about 1533 — 
Collier has a short sketch in his History (ll. 385), 
while another is more accessible to the ordinary 
reader in Dodsley's Collection (I. 49). There is plenty 
of shrewd humour in the latter. The dramatis per- 
sonae, if drama it can be called, are a Palmer, who 
begins with a long account of his various pilgrimages, 
a Pardoner, obviously intended as a satire against 
the Church, a Poticary and a Pedlar, the last with his 
rough and ready wit giving us a far-off touch of 
Autolycus, the prince of strolling vagabonds. The 
metre varies ; the Palmer commences with stanzas of 
four lines rhyming alternately, which afterwards give 
place to rhymed couplets of irregular lengths. Warton 
dismisses these Interludes somewhat contemptuously, 
but in the Four P's there is no lack of crude, out-of- 
door wit. Thus the pedlar's description of his wander- 
ings is capital, the disquisition on the efficacy of relics 
hardly less so, while the wager — who can tell the 



SHAKSPEJ^E'S EARLIER STYLE. I? 

greatest lie — with which they conclude, has something 
of Greene's quaintness of conception. Historically 
the pieces are important as containing the first hint 
of the Comedy that was initiated more definitely by 
Roister Doister, somewhere between 1534 and 1541. 
Rather later than this innovation marked by the 
appearance of Heywood's Interludes., the Morali- 
ties underwent another modification — this time in 
the direction of the Chronicle-History. Near the 
middle of the sixteenth century Bale's Kynge JoJian 
was written. Here the Morality Play merges into 
the Chronicle History of the older type, though 
semi-allegorical figures are still retained. Clergy, 
Sedition, Civil Order, and other survivals move about 
the scene, but fresh interest is given by the introduc- 
tion of genuine historical figures. King John, Stephen 
Langton, and others. Even here indeed the new 
dramatis personse are devoid of lifelike reality. Car- 
dinal Pandulphus, for instance, is little more than the 
old Papal greed personified, which had done duty in 
innumerable Moral Plays. Nevertheless the employ- 
ment of ordinary historical figures was a distinct 
advance, however incongruous the general effect 
might be. 

The mention of this play brings us almost to the be- 
ginning of Elizabeth's reign, and so far, as we see from 
skimming over this well-beaten ground, the develop- 
ment of the English drama had been regular. From 
1558 to 1587 this even course was, on the whole 



1 8 MARLOWKS INFLUENCE ON 

maintained ; then an altogether new start was made. 
The appearance of Tambiirlaine revolutionised the 
stage. We may compare it to Gotz von BerlicJdngen, 
or better still, as, I think, Mr Swinburne does, to 
Hernani. Victor Hugo and the Romanticists had a 
great literary system to crush. Classicism had all 
the prestige of the past in its favour, and only the 
sheer force of genius could overthrow such an adver- 
sary. In the same way Marlowe had formidable foes 
opposed to him, for in Taviburlaine he broke alto- 
gether with the traditions of the stage. His work 
was a passionate protest, and it had its effect. The 
drama that followed his Taviburlaine — the romantic 
drama of Shakspere — had little in common with what 
had gone before. It was not so much that the waters 
parted, as that the old stream stopped flowing, and a 
new river sprang up to take its place. For what could 
the preromantic stage show.-* Nothing but a dead 
mass of plays that scarcely deserved to be called 
dramas at all. The pieces were, roughly speaking, of 
two descriptions. There were plays written for per- 
formance at Court, at the Universities, and at the 
Inns of Courts ; this was the literary drama. Given 
an audience familiar with the Poetics of Aristotle 
it could be appreciated. But it had no claims to 
be considered national, indeed it had little or no 
connection at all with the people at large. It is 
true that some of the plays performed in the first 
instance at Court, notably those of Lyly — were after- 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 1 9 

wards brought out at the London theatres, but this 
was the exception — indeed before 1776 no regular 
theatre existed. Most of these Court pieces were 
only suitable for cultured audiences ; of such is the 
time-honoured Gorbodnc. It is difficult to conceive 
anything duller than this venerable tragedy. Lamb, 
respecting its antiquity, speaks of the piece with 
kindly euphemism as 'stiff and cumbersome — there 
may be flesh and blood, but we cannot get at it.' 
If the flesh and blood be there, it must be hidden 
very far from sight ; no critic has ever reached it. 
Excepting perhaps in the fourth act, there is abso- 
lutely no animation in the piece from beginning to 
end. The language is cold and sententious to a 
degree, stuffed with political maxims conveyed in 
speeches of insufferable length and dreariness. Thus 
in the second act (scene 2), in the debate between 
the King and his Courtiers, the characters are as 
prolix as Miss Griselda Oldbuck in the Antiquai'y. 
Philander takes 99 lines to state his case ; Eubulus 
replies in 90, while the closing speech in Act v. ex- 
tends to exactly 100 lines. Of course, the dramatists 
were hampered by the use of a new metre which they 
did not understand, and a dramatic theory which was 
radically mistaken. But a popular audience does not 
make allowances, and it would be in their eyes but a 
poor compensation for the dreariness of the piece, for 
its stilted sententiousness and want of action, that the 
authors observed the proper Horatian maxim, and, 



20 MARLOWE S INFLUENCE ON 

instead of representing the death of the younger 
brother coram popitlo, took care that it should be 
narrated by the famiHar messenger. That it should 
end with an anticlimax, the catastrophe coming in 
the fourth act and the concluding scenes being eked 
out with fresh and irrelevant matter, is a minor point. 
Here is, perhaps, the best speech in the play — that of 
Marcella : 

O hard and cruel hap that thus assigned 

Unto so worthy wight so wretched end: 

But most hard cruel heart that could consent 

To lend the hateful destinies that hand, 

By which alas ! so heinous crime was wrought. 

O queen of adamant, O marble breast, 

If not the favour of his comely face. 

If not his princely cheer and countenance, 

His valiant active arms, his manly breast, 

If not his fair and seemly personage, 

His noble limbs in such proportion cast. 

As would have wrapt a silly woman's thought, 

If this mought not have moved thy bloody heart. 

And that most cruel hand the wretched weapon 

Even to let fall, and kissed him in the face, 

With tears of ruth to reave such one by death. 

Should nature yet consent to slay her son? 

In this perhaps there is a ring of pathos and 
passion that rises above the monotony of the verse — 
and what fearful monotony it is — but such passages 
are few and far between in the play, which, whatever 
it was, certainly cannot be called romantic in style. 
If Gorboduc lacked vitality, Damon and Pythias, to take 
another type of the drama popular at Court, possessed 
even less interest. It deserves, however, to be noticed 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 21 

if only on account of the extraordinary reputation 
which its author, Richard Edwards, enjoyed. The 
critics of the period seem for some unknown reason to 
have conspired to praise him. He is mentioned by 
Meres in Palladis Tainia as 'best for comedy,' the h'st 
including 'mellifluous and honey-tongued' Shakspere^; 
Puttenham in his Arte of Poetry is equally complimen- 
tary, while another critic saluted Edwards (but this 
was in an epitaph^) as 

'flower of our realm 
And Phoenix of our age.' 

On what this reputation rested we cannot say. 
Only one of Edwards' plays is extant ; of another, his 
Palamon and Arcyte — which was played before the 
queen at Oxford in September, 1566, the stage, as 
we are told, literally giving way on the first night of 
performance, doubtless under the extreme heaviness 
of the piece — the name alone has survived. But if all 
the dramatist's works were like Damon and Pythias it 
is perhaps well that oblivion should have claimed 
them for her own, for assuredly Damon and his friend 
are 'far, far from gay.' The piece according to the 
prologue is a 'tragical-comedy,' and it would be hard 
to say which parts of it are worst. Perhaps the 
comedy, as represented by the dialogue between the 
Collier (from Croydon) and the two Servants of the 
court of Syracuse, is the most notably imbecile; in 

1 Dodsley's Collection, i. 168. 

2 Collier, iii. 2. 



22 , MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

the tragic scenes one can at times trace an illusive 
touch of pathos. For the rest, Damon and Pythias is 
a dreary waste of rhymed crudities ; there is no cha- 
racterisation, no plot; the language is utterly common- 
place, and the piece abounds with incongruities, such 
as the introduction of the Muses to mourn over the 
intended murder of 'poor Pythias.' And yet the author 
was a conspicuously popular Court poet! Gorboduc 
was produced at the Inner Temple; the 'children of 
the Queen's Chapel' performed i^(^;/^(9;/ and Pythias. 
On a far higher level than either of these pieces, but 
belonging to the same type of literary drama, stands 
The Arraignment of Paris, written soon after Peele 
had left the University. As a dramatist Peele must 
be put low down in the scale — he seems to me much 
inferior to Greene in humour, in inventiveness, in 
capacity for delineating character — but as a poet his 
merits are considerable. His language is always clear 
and harmonious, his verse — and he could handle a 
variety of metres with remarkable ease and grace — 
always pleasant. His blank verse, it is true, rarely 
got beyond the limits of the couplet, and to the last 
remained monotonous, but then it is the monotony of 
sweetness. There is something indescribably cloying 
in all he wrote. Every line of David and Bethsabe, 
which Charles Lamb contemptuously dismissed as 
' stuff,' breathes an atmosphere of luxurious languor. 
In his later works this became a mere mannerism, but 
in his Arraignment of Paris, and unfortunately this is 



SHAA'SPEHE'S EARLIER STYLE. 23 

the only one 'of Peek's dramas written prior to the 
appearance of Tainburlaine that has survived, the poet 
is less conspicuously the ' Verborum Artifex ' that 
delighted Nash\ The Arraigiuncnt indeed, which 
reads like a college exercise, is fairly simple in style. 
Dramatically, like the majority of Court plays, it is 
worthless ; as a poem, unlike them, it is by no means 
devoid of beauty. It is pretty safe to say that the 
average piece acted by 'the Children of the Chapel' 
did not contain anything like the following passage. 
It is the speech of CEnone, as she sits under the tree 
with Paris. 

- And whereon then shall be my roundelay? 

For thou hast heard my store long since, dare say, 
How Saturn did divide his kingdom tho' 
To Tove, to Neptune, and to Dis below ; 
'' How mighty men made foul successless war 

Against trie Gods and state of Jupiter. 



How fair Narcissus tooting on his shade 

Reproves disdain, and tells how form doth vade. 

How cunning Philomela's needle tells 

V\'hat force in love, what wit in sorrow, dwells: 

What pains unhappy souls abide in hell, 

They say, because on earth, they lived not well — 

Ixion's wheel, proud Tantal's pining woe, 

Prometheus' torment, and a many moe: 

How Danaus' daughters ply their endless task, 

What toil, the toil of Sisyphus doth ask. 

^ The phrase occurs in the oft-quoted 'Address to the Gentlemen 
Students of both Universities,' prefixed to Greene's 'Arcadia, or 
Menaphon' — 1587. Probably Nash is praising Peele at the expense of 
Marlowe, whom he attacks in the same pamphlet, though afterwards 
they worked together. 



24 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

This is at least pleasing, fluent verse, with a deli- 
cate flavour of pastoral conceit; indeed, all the pastoral 
scenes are marked by the same freshness and lightness 
of touch. But the general effect is preposterous ; as a 
drama The Arraignment is beneath criticism. Yet 
there were probably dozens of plays of the same 
description, pastorals, pageants, and what not, pro- 
duced at Court, and differing only from this piece in 
that they lacked the one quality of genuine poetry 
which redeems^ all Peele's work from utter oblivion. 
In the same way there were probably dozens of 'tragi- 
comedies' like Damon and Pythias, perhaps dozens 
of tragedies pure and simple like Gorboduc, that were 
performed in private. If we add to these the comedies 
of Lyly, which, it must be confessed, contained some 
elements of popularity, and the purely classical play^, 
whether adapted or translated directly from Seneca 
and Euripides, we have the main elements of what 
may be called the literary drama. Compared with 
the drama that followed and eclipsed it, the romantic 
drama of which there was scarcely a trace, when 
Marlowe came before the world with Tambttrlaine, 
this literary drama was a mere mountain of dulness, 
'gross, open, palpable.' To the nation at large it 

^ Occasionally Peele gives us really fine lines in Marlowe's style; 
thus in The Tale of Troy he speaks of the Greek fleet leaving Aulis, 

As shoots a streaming star in winter's night, 
A thousand ships well-rigged, a glorious sight, 
Waving ten thousand flags. 



/ 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 2$ 

could make no appeal. The uncritical audiences 
who thronged the playhouses on the Bankside, who 
were to be found in the Innyard of the Bell Savage, 
asked for something more imposing than these 
vamped-up classical puppets moralising on stilts. 
The schoolmaster in the Heart of Midlothian was 
contemptuous of our 'modern Babylonian jargons:' 
they struck him as being really poor compared with 
the 'learned languages.' But the average Elizabethan 
audience had no such enthusiasm for the classics. 
They were in the position of Shakspere himself, of 
knowing 'little Latin and less Greek,' and to such 
everyday men and women the Poetics of Aristotle 
mattered not at all. A dramatist might, if he liked, 
violate all the unities in a single act, might scatter to 
the wind? what one of Dickens' characters calls the 
'universal dovetailedness,' that should harmonise the 
action of every play — so long as he could amuse his 
audience, could make their pulses beat quicker, could 
move their tears and laughter. They came — or at 
least chey did later on — to laugh at, and laugh with, 
the 'Epicurean rascal' Sir John Falstafif, to sigh over 
the .sorrows of Romeo and Juliet, to follow the fortunes 
of 'warlike Harry' and others whose names had be- 
come household words. The scene might be rude, 
but imagination compensated for its poverty ; they 
were ready to admit the poet's appeal. 

But pardon, gentles all. 
The flat unraised spirits that have dared 



■ 



26 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth 
So great an object ; Can this cockpit hold 
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram 
Within this wooden O the very casques 
That did affright the air at Agincourt? 
O pardon, since a crooked figure may 
Attest in little place a million, 
And let us ciphers to this great accompt 
On your imaginary forces work. 

A popular audience, then, wanted sensation, they 
wanted amusement. The Hterary drama as it then 
existed could give them neither, and so they turned 
elsewhere ; and naturally their demand was met. 
Comedies and farces of the crudest type ; melo- 
dramas of ' the high, heroic fustian ' order, in which 
there was at least flesh and blood ; Moral Plays, like 
Lupton's All for Money, which the author indefinitely 
termed 'A pitiful comedy' and 'A pleasant tragedy,' 
the piece having no claim to either title; Chronicle 
Plays in prose ; tragedies written in every possible 
variety of metre, in ballad lines of 14 syllables, in 
stanzas, in the ordinary rhymed couplet — in a word, 
all sorts and conditions of plays overflowed the stage. 
But everything was crude; dramas were tossed off". 
The public were in the first state of enthusiasm, y/hen 
admiration is for the time stronger than criticism. 
They gratefully accepted what the dramatist gave 
them, however bald, however undigested, and so the 
divorce between literature and the stage, which forrrjs 
nowadays the text of periodical magazine articles, 
was almost complete. The popular drama was not 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 2/ 

literary; the literary drama was not popular. Their 
union was the problem, which some great dramatist 
had to solve, and that dramatist was Christopher Mar- 
lowe. He found the stage choked with a cumbrous 
mass of rubbish, and his feeling towards it was that of 
the Walrus and the Carpenter, when (in both senses of 
the word) they expatiated on the sand of the sea- 
shore : 

"'If this were only cleared away', 
They said, 'it would be grand'." 

The speakers, it will be remembered in Mr Carroll's 
little poem, gave up their ideal as unattainable ; the 
sand remained. Marlowe was more successful. He 
swept the stage clear of the miserable stuff that Court 
poets and the rhymsters of the Bankside foisted upon 
the people as plays. He did not attempt to breathe 
new life into the dead bones of the classical drama. 
Had he done so, critics might have pointed to the 
English stage as one more proof of the truth of Mon- 
taigne's pregnant aphorism, 'C'est un bel et grand ad- 
gencement sans doubte que le grec et le latin — mais 
on I'achepte trop cher;' on the other hand he did 
not adopt the course suggested in Johnson's cynical 
couplet — 

The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give ; 
For those who live to please, must please to live. 

He determined to wean the public from ' the 
jigging veins of rhyming mother wits ' that made the 
popular drama debased in the extreme, and to do this 



28 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

he created something that differed absolutely from 
what men had hitherto seen on the stage. What that 
V something was it is time to inquire. 
K In considering Marlowe's works it is well to re- 
>"i member one thing, that he is the most personal of 
poets ; it is impossible to think of him apart from his 
plays, and vice versa. Usually the attempt to read 
between the lines, as the phrase is, and by so doing to 
evolve some idea of an author's personality, is not 
very successful : yet it is a task which some critics 
find extremely congenial and entertaining. Touch- 
stone's irritating query, ' Hast any philosophy in 
thee .-* ' is always on their lips when they approach a 
new work, the presumption in their minds being that 
the writer must have started with a definite purpose, 
' a criticism of life ' in some form or other ; and this 
central idea once discovered ought theoretically to 
reveal in a measure the character of the author, and 
thus the true seeker is, as it were, personally conducted 
behind the scenes into the presence of the writer 
himself. Everyone remembers Schumann's indignant 
commentary on these acrostic-solvers, who of course 
almost invariably lose themselves in a maze of con- 
flicting theories till at last ' Metaphysic calls for aid 
on Sense.' And so long as we deal with the Immortals 
of literature it must always be so, for the best work is 
always impersonal. The great poet is not one man, 
he is, in sympathy, in humanity, a dozen. It is when 
we come to writers of the second class that we find 



SHAA'SPEJiE'S EARLIER STYLE. 29 

ourselves on firmer ground. There are some poets 
whose personality breathes in every line, each work 
being a revelation of their character, an autobio- 
graphical fragment; of such, to take the time-honoured 
instance, is Byron. Everything he wrote was touched 
with egotism, and it is this very intrusion of the 
personal element that lends his best work the 
sovereign quality of ' sincerity and strength,' which, 
in Mr Swinburne's words, ' covers all his offences and 
outweighs all his defects.' Marlowe belonged to this 
class of writers ; for once it is safe to put a poet's 
work into the critical crucible. Each of his plays can 
be resolved into the prime conception from which the 
dramatist started, and each in turn brings us into 
close contact with the author himself It is well to 
keep this in mind in looking at his dramas. 

His works may be easily grouped. Echvard II. 
stands by itself; it represents the highest development 
of the poet's genius, it represents too what was practi- 
cally a new creation of Marlowe's, the genuine histori- 
cal play. The tragedy of Dido, left unfinished at his 
death, is rather a love poem than a drama, and may 
be classed with the writer's exquisite Hero and 
Leander, both expressing in a high degree the purely 
sensuous Italian love of beauty for beauty's sake which 
was typical of the Renaissance spirit. The Massacre 
at Paris is a mere fragment ; the text is so imperfect 
and corrupt that for purposes of criticism the play is 
wellnig-h useless. We are left with three dramas — 



30 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

representing Marlowe's earlier style, the two parts of 
Tambitrlaine, the Jczv of Malta, and the Tragical- 
History of Dr Faustiis. They may be treated to- 
gether, since each was written in conformity with a 
dramatic theory peculiar to Marlowe. Various 
writers have pointed out' — what indeed is sufficiently 
obvious — that each of these plays is a one-character 
drama. In Taviburlaine we have the great conqueror, 
who towers above all rivals ; in the Je%v of Malta we 
have Barabas, the prototype of Shylock ; in Faustus, 
the magician of mediaeval legend. In each case the 
interest centres round the one overshadowing person- 
ality ; there are practically no minor characters. And 
if each play resolves itself into a single character, so 
each of these characters is the personification of a 
single prevailing passion. Tamburlaine represents 
the lust of dominion : here is the expression of his 
creed, given in some of the finest lines the poet ever 
wrote — 

The thirst of reign and sweetness "" of a crown 
That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops 
To thrust his doting father from his chair, 
And place himself in the empyreal heavens, 
Moved me to manage arms against thy state. 
Nature that framed us of four elements. 
Warring within our breasts for regiment, 
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: 
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 

^ No one more successfully than Professor Dowden, Fortnightly 
Review, January 1870. 



SHAA'SPEJ^E'S EARLIER STYLE. 3 1 

The wondrous architecture of the world i, 
And measure every planet's wandering course, 
Still climbing after knowledge infinite, 
And always moving, as the restless spheres, 
Wills us to wear ourselves, and never rest, 
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, 
That perfect bliss and sole felicity. 
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. 

(ii. 7, II — 29, Part i.) 

In these lines we have the gist of the whole play ; 
and it is the same in the Jezv of Malta. There may 
be a second plot — the love story of Abigail and her 
death — but primarily the interest centres in Barabas, 
and Barabas is the thirst for gold personified. Here 
is the outburst of his grief, when he believes that he 
has lost all : 

My gold ! My gold ! and all my wealth is gone ! 

You partial heavens, have I deserved this plague? 

What! will you thus oppose me, luckless stars? 

To make me desperate in my poverty? 

And knowing me impatient in distress, 

Think me so mad as I will hang myself, 

That I may vanish o'er the earth in air 

And leave no memory that e'er I was? 

No, I will live. (i. 2, 258—266.) 

And so he schemes to recover his possessions, and 
when, in the next act, Abigail flings down the bags 

■•• 'The wondrous architecture of the world' — and yet Schlegel could 
not understand what Ben Jonson meant by 'Marlowe's mighty line'! 
though Marlowe might have been the 'better spirit' of whom Shak- 
speare himself wrote : 

'Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, 



That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse.' 



32 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

to him, the intensity of his passionate joy is ahnost 
fiendish and uncanny. 

O my girl ! 
My gold, my fortune, my felicity, 
Strength to my soul, death to my enemy! 
Welcome the first beginner of my bliss ! 
O Abigail, Abigail, that I had thee here too ! 
Then my desires were fully satisfied. 
But I will practise thy enlargement hence: 
O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss! 

Faustus typifies an incomparably nobler passion, 
the thirst for boundless knowledge. In the prologue 
to the Jeiu of Malta Machiavel is made to say, 

'I count religion but a childish toy. 
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.' 

That is the philosophy of Faust. He is a very 
Paracelsus in ambition. Nature shall reveal her 
secrets to him ; he will no longer be bound with the 
fetters imposed on other men. 

In each play, then, it is this all-dominating, over- 
powering passion that runs like a golden thread of silk 
through the tangled intricacies of the parts, giving co- 
herence to all, and ensuring harmony of effect. It is in 
depicting the rise and progress of this central passion 
that the dramatist expends all the resources of his art.^ 

1 Peele in his Honourable Order of the Garter, or rather in the pro- 
logue 'ad Ma^cenatem', naturally alludes to Marlowe, and it is to this 
very capacity of the poet for depicting passion that he refers, 
'Unhappy in thine end, 
Marley, the Muses' darhng for thy verse. 
Fit to write passions for the souls below, 
If any wretched souls in passion speak.' 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 



He shows us its beginning, aflame that slowly brightens 
and broadens until its fire fanned by the wind sweeps 
mightily onward, devastating all and at last consum- 
ing its originator. This peculiarity in Marlowe's 
earlier plays is undoubtedly a source of weakness. 
To think of one of Shakspere's greatest tragedies is 
not to think of a single character; if OtJicllo is 
mentioned, our mind does not recur to Othello alone. 
The interest is spread over the whole. Each of the " 
dramatis person?e contributes his share to the general 
effect ; they are not mere ciphers moving idly about 
the scene, as impotent and unreal as the ghosts that 
gibbered round Odysseus. A great drama is complex ; 
it flashes upon you, like the facets of a diamond, with 
a thousand different lights. But it is not so with 
Marlowe's different plays. Each emits one steady 
stream of scorching fire ; no miore. To recall to 
mind The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, is to re- 
member the man who to win the world lost his own 
soul ; on the other characters we bestow not a thought. 
And the same is true of the other plays — of Tain- 
burlaine, and the Jeiv of Malta. I said above that 
no poet w^as more self-revealing than Marlowe. The 
impress of his personality is stamped on every page 
with clear, firm lines ; for, although the passions which 
his various characters personify, seem to us at first 
sight to be distinct, yet if we look closer we find that 
in reality they are one and the same. They are but 
different aspects of the all-absorbing passion that 
V. 3 



34 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

burns deep down in the heart of the poet — the flame 
that feeds on his very soul. And that passion is 
desire of power. Lust of dominion — lust of wealth — 
lust of knowledge— they all come to that. Tambur- 
laine craves for kingship : like the Duke of Guise, he 
will weary the world with his wars — and why ? To 
conquer is to be powerful, and it is in the exercise of 
power when won that he delights with a wild pagan 
joy. 

Tamlnirlaine. Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles? 
Is it not passing brave to be a king, 
And ride in triumph through Persepolis? 

Tecli. O, my lord, 'tis sweet and full of pomp. 

Usiitii. To be a king, is half to be a god. 

This is the spirit of the play. Again, Barabas 
loves his gold as he loves his child ; it is almost flesh 
of his flesh. But his passion is not petty ; it is no 
sordid avarice. To Silas Marner, with no faith in man, 
no trust in God, with the desolation of despair in his 
heart, his money was the one tiny ray of light and 
love that shone across the gloom of his life. ' His 
gold as he hung over it and saw it grow, gathered his 
power of loving together into a hard isolation like its 
own.' But Barabas does not amass gold for gold's 
sake. It is for the power that money brings that he 
cares, and still more for the revenge it may give him 
on his enemies. 

Thus trowls our fortune in by land and sea, 
And thus are we on every side enriched. 
These are the blessings promised to the Jews 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 35 

And herein was old Abraham's happiness: 

What more may heaven do for earthly man 

Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps, 

Ripping the bowels of the earth for them, 

Making the seas their servants, and the winds 

To drive their substance with successful blasts? 

Who hateth me but for my happiness? 

Or who is honoured now but for his wealth ? 

Rather had I a Jew be hated thus, 

Than pitied in a Christian poverty. (i. i, 102 — 115.) 

This extract may give some idea of the feeling — 
' Money is power ' — that, not perhaps formulated in 
any one passage, nevertheless breathes throughout 
the whole play\ And if Tamburlaine and Barabas 

^ By the 'whole play' I mean of course such parts as can be safely 
assigned to Marlowe. The true history of this drama we can never 
know; only one thing is certain, that "the first two acts of the yew of 
Malta are more vigorously conceived both as to character and circum- 
stance than any other Elizabethan play except those of Shakspeare" — 
Hallam, Literatiwe of Europe, II. 270. This is high praise, but not I 
think too high. The poet displays astonishing power and grasp in the 
first scenes; at the end of the second Act he has a noble plot in hand, 
and then suddenly he seems to drop the threads, and all is a hopeless 
maze of grotesque buffoonery. In the fifth Act there is a partial revival 
of power. In Acts III. and IV. we doubtless have some of Marlowe's 
work, but it is mixed up with the crudest clownage, the rhyme, we may 
note, increasing considerably. A sufficient proof of the corruptness of 
the text is, I think, furnished by the following passage. Ithamore is 
speaking to Bellamira, — iv. 4, 95 — 105, 

We will leave this paltry land, 
And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece, 
I'll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece. 
Where painted carpets o'er the meads are hurled. 
And Bacchus' vineyards overspread the world. 
Where woods and forests go in goodly green, 
I'll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love's queen. 

3—2 



36 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

have their conception of power and, each in his own 
way, strive to compass their ideal, still more is this the 
case with Faustus. Knowledge is his end and aim ; 

But on her forehead sits a fire: 

She sets her forward countenance 

And leaps into the future chance 
Submitting all things to desire. 

Half-grown as yet, a child and vain, 
She cannot fight the fear of death. 
What is she, cut from love and faith. 

But some wild Pallas from the brain 

Of Demons? fiery hot to burst 

All barriers in her onward race 
For power. 

These lines ^ are a perfect epitome of the Faust 
legend, as treated by Marlowe. It is at power that 
Faustus grasps, and knowledge, he thinks, can give 

The meads, the orchards and the primrose lanes. 

Instead of sedge and reeds, bear sugar-canes: 

Thou in these groves, by Dis above, 

Shalt live with me and be my love. 
Is it credible that the poet could have written this pitiable parody of his 
own incomparable pastoral ? Half the poets of the period attempted to 
imitate the inimitable 'Come live with me'. To copy it, as in the 
eighteenth century to write an essay on the Spectator model, was the 
Ulysses' bow which everyone tried to draw. It is scarcely probable that 
Marlowe himself would have dragged into his play the jingling jargon 
given above, ineffably worse than the worst of the avowed imitations of 
his lyric. The writer, I imagine, inserted them as an easy way of 
palming off his own 'jigging wits' as Marlowe's work. The average 
spectator would catch the last line and be deluded into the belief that 
the whole act was by Marlowe. The lyric is parodied in precisely the 
same way in ''least's Dominion,''' for the same reason. 
1 l7i Memoriam, Canto cxiv. 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 37 

it — but not ordinary knowledge. He has tried every 
science — he has exhausted them all. He passes them 
in review, and dismisses each with a sad, ' Why,Faustus, 
hast thou not attained that end .'' ' And yet his 
longing has not been satisfied : he is ' but Faustus, 
and a man.' A man ! what bitter irony for one, who 
has the ambition of a God. And then the thought 
comes that magic will put the world at his feet. It 
intoxicates him. He can resist no more. He agrees 
to seal the compact, bids Mephistopheles return to 
Lucifer, and there, standing on the very brink of the 
precipice, is lost in one more vision of what the future 
will bring. 

Fatistus. Go and return to mighty Lucifer, 

And meet me in my study at midnight. 
And then resolve me of thy master's mind. 

Mcphist. I will, Faustus. \_Exit. 

Faustus. Had I as many souls as there be stars, 
I'd give them all for Mephistophilis. 
By him I'll be great emperor of the world 
And make a bridge thorough the moving air, 
To pass the ocean with a band of men : 
I'll join the hills that bind the Afric shore 
And make that country continent to Spain, 
And both contributary to my crown. 
The emperor shall not live but by my leave. 
Nor any potentate of Germany. 

' L'amour de I'impossible' — to borrow Mr Symonds' 
phrase — is the keynote of these three plays. It is 
likewise the keynote of the poet's own character. One 
can trace in all he wrote the presence impalpable, 
indefinable, of a will for ever warring with convention. 



38 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

He pants to be free. There is nothing petty in 
Marlowe's poetry. He soars aloft, ' affecting thoughts 
coequal with the clouds.' He reminds one of Shelley 
— not the ' real Shelley ' — but the poet who speaks to 
us in some of the noblest verse and the noblest prose 
that our literature contains. Each was in a state of 
perpetual revolt against the tyranny of social custom, 
and each might be addressed in Shelley's own lines to 
William Godwin. 

Mighty eagle, thou that soarest 
O'er the misty mountain forest, 

And amid the light of morning, 
Like a cloud of glory hiest, 
And when night descends, deftest 
The embattled tempest's warning. 

We see the revolutionary bent of Marlowe's nature 
in the very fact that he scornfully turned aside from 
the path trodden by previous dramatists, and boldly 
struck out a new course. 

What glory is there in a common good 
That hangs for every peasant to achieve? 

is the spoken thought of the Duke of Guise, and it is 
no less the soliloquy of the poet. He blindly stretches 
his hands to heaven, and clutches at something ' that 
flies beyond his reach.' He is like the men round 
him, who hardly knew what they could, and could not, 
do. The world had drunk too deep of the Renais- 
sance doctrines ^ Men were intoxicated with an un- 

- Cf. Shaksperc^s Predecessors, p. 629. 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 19 

known sensation of life, and power, and passion, 
pulsating in their hearts. They yearned after— they 
hardly knew what — and Marlowe was the incarnation 
of this spirit. We know very little about his life, but 
that little strengthens the conviction that his powers, 
though great, were undisciplined, uncontrolled. He 
has scarcely any sense of their limitation. His earlier 
work is lacking in proportion ; it is bitter, extreme, ex- 
aggerated. Tradition accuses him of Atheism. Prob- 
ably Marlowe was no more an atheist than Shelley 
was\ Faustiis surely is a sufficient answer to this 
charge. The man who could paint with such terrible 
truth the desolation of despair, the agony of repen- 
tance, not merely fear, that sweeps over the soul of 
Faustus, was assuredly not devoid of religious emo- 
tion. But that Marlowe hated the Church as the 
Church was then constituted, that he hated its dogma, 
its tyranny, its system, seems to me beyond all doubt. 
There are passages in his plays that breathe the 
deepest loathing of Christianity ; passages, where the 
bitterness of the speaker seems out of all proportion 
to the dramatic requirements of the context. At 
such times we seem to catch the ring of the poet's 
own voice. 



^ Cf. Mr Bullen's Introduction, LXVII. — vin. Meres, in Palladis 
Tatuia says, 'As Jodelle, a French tragical poet, being an epicure and 
an atheist, made a pitiful end, so our tragical poet Marlowe, for his 
epicurism and atheism, had a tragical death.' Mr BuUen and Dyce 
quote similar evidence. 



40 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

To emphasize in this way the deeply personal 
element in Marlowe's work is not, I think, superfluous. 
It is surely remarkable that his first three plays 
should contain only three strongly-drawn characters, 
and that each of these should be guided by a passion, 
which in turn we find to have been the prevailing 
passion of the poet's own nature. For to say this is 
equivalent to saying that Tamburlaine, Barabas and 
Faustus are merely different aspects of the poet him- 
self. And yet it is so. To conceive them he had to 
draw upon himself; he appealed to his own emotional 
experience. They are not the offspring of a purely 
creative imagination — they are rather projections 
from the poet's own inmost soul. Marlowe, in other 
words, is not in these three plays the spectator ad 
extra who conceives by the sheer force of imaginative 
genius a great character, — great in its goodness, or 
the reverse — with which he has no personal sympathy; 
he is the character. His passions are the passions of 
Faustus. There is no gulf between the poet and the 
beings whom he paints in his poetry ; he is merged in 
them. Mr Furnivall in his valuable introduction to 
the Leopold Shakspere has some remarkable words on 
this point. He says, " As to the question how far 
we are justified in assuming that Shakspere put his 
own feelings — himself — into his own plays, some men 
scorn the notion ; ask you triumphantly which of 
his characters represents him, assert that he himself is 
in none of them, but sits apart, serene, unruffled him- 



SHAR'SFERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 4 1 

self by earthly passion, making his puppets move. 
I believe on the contrary that all the deepest and 
greatest work of an artist, playwright, orator, painter, 
poet, is based on personal experience, on his own 
emotions and passions, and not merely on his obser- 
vations of things or feelings outside him, on which 
his fancy and imagination work... He himself (Shak- 
spere), his own nature and life are in all his plays." 
As applied to Shakspere, this doctrine is at least 
unusual. If ever there was a poet with a supreme 
faculty for conceiving situations into which experience 
had never brought him — of drawing characters as 
unlike his own as Lear is unlike Falstafif — of being 
swayed, as it were, in the persons of these characters 
by passions which had no part or share in his own 
nature — that poet, one would have thought, was 
Shakspere. However, as far as the theory refers to 
Shakspere it is no task of ours to examine it. Many 
people would be inclined to dissent from the general 
proposition, that the greatest work of a great artist is 
based on personal experience. But so far as Marlowe 
is concerned, the passage quoted above admirably 
expresses the truth. In Tcunburlaine, the jfeiv of 
Malta, and Faustus, Marlowe does not display the 
highest type of imagination. He gives us three 

1 An article in the Conihill Magazine, Vol. XLUi. — 'Why did 
Shakspeare write Tragedies' — signed with the initials 'J. S.' and pre- 
sumably written by Mr James Spedding, contains a fine criticism of Mr 
Furnivall's point. 



42 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

characters ; each character is, more or less, the poet 
himself, and each is finely drawn. But when he goes 
outside himself, and has recourse to the purely- 
imaginative faculty — whatever it be — he fails com- 
pletely. The other dramatis personae are mere 
shadows, simulacra modis pallentia miris. Who, as a 
writer^ on the subject fairly remarks, ever realized 
Cosroe, Mycetes, and the rest } To the last Marlowe 
never succeeded in drawing a female character. 
Greene was the first to give the stage women at all 
comparable to those of Shakspere. Again, Marlowe 
was deficient, I think, in the lower form of imagination. 
He had little inventiveness ; he had none of Greene's 
inexhaustible fancy. Greene was never at a loss ; he 
was full of the playwright's resource ; he could always 
devise some ingenious scene. But Marlowe in his 
earlier plays shows a remarkable poverty in this 
respect. When he attempts a striking situation, his 
work is crude and rough-hewn. His effects, to vary 
the metaphor, are too often achieved by simple dashes 
of paint on the canvas. 

To turn now to the first of the three works pre- 
viously discussed. The two parts of Taniburlaine, 
like the two parts of Henry IV., form a complete 
drama in ten acts, and may fairly be treated as a 
single play. The faults of this play are obvious ; they 
are in the main such as would naturally spring from 
the peculiarities of Marlowe's dramatic method. 
1 Quarterly Revieiv, October, 1885. 



SHAA'Sf'ERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 43 

Tambnrlaine is not, properly speaking, a drama at 
all ; it is rather a series of impressive scenes, We 
have no plot, no complexity of action, no interde- 
pendence and balance of parts. It does not begin 
at any definite point, and dramatically there is no 
very definite reason why it should end. Tambnrlaine 
at the outset intended to conquer the world ; by the 
close of the tenth act he cannot, like Alexander, 
complain that his conquests are exhausted. Instead 
therefore of his death, we might have expected a 
third part, and so on ; except indeed that of the 
subsidiary characters' few reach even the tenth act. 
Whereas in a play of Shakspere's we have a dozen 
threads that run in and out, and half tangled, half 
unravelled, are in the end gathered up by the drama- 
tist and united, there is in Tmnbiirlaine but a solitary 
streak of gold. This slender thread of interest — at 
times drawn perilously fine — that keeps the whole 
together, is of course Tamburlaine's lust of power. 
His passion for conquest is the leitmotif of the piece. 
There is no other continuous interest, because there 
are no other characters. There are indeed fine 
episodes, such as the death of Bajazeth (Part I. V. i.) 
the love scenes with Zenocrate, and the death scene 

^ The list of deaths in Tambnrlaine is almost as formidable as the 
catalogue drawn up by Mr Ruskin in his criticism on Bleak House, 
e.g. Part i. ii. 7, Cosi-oe dies— iii. 1, Argier — v. i, Bajazeth and Zabina 
— Soldan of Egypt. Part 11. ii. 3, Sigismund — ii. 4, Zenocrate — iii. 4, 
Captain of the Fort — iv. 2, Calyphas — iv. 3, Olympia — v. i, Governor 
of Babylon — v. 3, Tamburlaine. 



44 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 



of Zenocrate, Part II. ii. 3. But it is on Tamburlaine 
himself that the action of the whole drama turns, 
from the first scene where we hear him exclaim, 
'I am a lord, for so my deeds shall prove' — to the 
last, where, tracing out ' the world of ground ' that lies 
westward he complains that he must ' die and this 
unconquered.' The poet was determined that the 
central figure should arrest attention, and indisputably 
he has succeeded in drawing a figure of extraordinary 
efifectiveness, the very embodiment of Titanic will 
and force. In the second act Tamburlaine is described. 

Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned, 

Like his desire, lift upward and divine, 

So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit. 

Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear 

Old Atlas' burden ; twixt his manly pitch, 

A pearl, more worth than all the world, is placed, 

Wherein by curious sovereignty of art 

Are fixed his piercing instruments of sight. 

Whose fiery circles bear encompassed 

A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres. 

That guide his steps and actions to the throne, 

Where honour sits invested royally; 

Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion. 

Thirsting with sovereignty and love of arms: 

His lofty brows in folds do figure death. 

And in their smoothness amity and life. 

About them hangs a knot of amber hair, 

W^rapped in curls, as fierce Achilles' was. 

On which the breath of heaven delights to play, 

Making it dance with wanton majesty. 

His arms and fingers long and sinewy ; 

Betokening valour and excess of strength, 

In every part proportioned like a man. 

Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine. 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 45 



This might be a description of some picture by 
Rembrandt. We seem to see the face of the great 
world-conqueror lit up with one of those dazzling 
streams of light that Rembrandt could introduce into 
his portraits with such infinite effect. The reader, 
as distinguished from the spectator, is able to realise 
the poet's conception of Tamburlaine in every detail, 
and it is this conception alone that gives coherence, 
or something like it, to a series of unconnected 
pageants. Remove Tamburlaine and the ten acts are 
simple chaos. That this should be so, that the play 
should depend entirely on the presence on the stage of 
one character, that there should be no balance of 
parts, no relief, no evolution of thought, nothing, in 
short, but the progress of the central figure as con- , 
queror, is surely a great dramatic flaw. Another 
fault in Tamburlaine is the extravagance of style', 
shown in two ways. In the first place there are 'the 
huffing braggart lines,' which 'Mine Ancient' in 
Henry IV. vainly endeavours to imitate. On this 
point indeed Pistol is the best critic, as he was one of 
the first, and really there is nothing more to be said 

1 If the introduction to the golden age of Elizabethan literature was 
marked by exaggeration of style, the silver age, the age of Tourneur 
and others, is open to the same charge. Cf. Mr Edmund Gosse's remarks 
on this point, Shakespeare to Pope, p. 29. The explanation is obvious. 
The extravagance of those who precede the great period is the extrava- 
gance of inexperience ; the extravagance of those who follow a Shak- 
spere is that of imitation. The first class of writers have no models to 
guide them : the second class have models, whose greatness they only 
parody in their attempts to reproduce it. 



46 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

on the subject. It would be superfluous to insist on 
the mere Midsummer madness of such speeches as 
that of Tamburlaine in the second part (iv. 4), intro- 
duced by the famous Hne, ' Holla, ye pampered jades 
of Asia.' After all Marlowe was very young when he 
wrote this play, and relying on the truth of a familiar 
epigram we may say that even the youngest poets 
must make mistakes. Such faults are exactly those 
of an unformed style. Moreover, as Collier suggests^ 
Marlowe had to satisfy his audience ; he could not 
afford at the outset to soar clean over their heads. 
He had taken away their rhyme, and as a substitute 
gave them ' high astounding terms.' The extravagance 
of language in Tamburlaine is balanced by extra- 
vagance of incident. ' Schiller,' says Coleridge, ' has 
the material sublime ; to produce an effect he sets 
you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their 
mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old 
tower. But Shakspere drops a handkerchief, and the 
same, or a greater effect, follows.' This is exactly 
applicable to Marlowe. When the poet would move 
pity, a whole troop of maidens must be put to the 
sword ; Zenocrate dies, and the flames of Larissa can 
alone quench the tears of Tamburlaine. 

It is \\\\s ferocitc \x\ tone and treatment that repels 
French critics of our Elizabethan literature. It is the 
waste of energy, the squandering of power, that a 
'literature of genius' according to Mr Matthew Arnold, 



SHAA'SFERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 47 

inevitably entails. Given a literary Court of Judg- 
ment like the French Academy, such excesses would 
be impossible ; but then such an innovation as the 
introduction of blank verse would have been equally 
out of the question. We must balance the good with 
the evil. There are many faults in Tavibiudaine, but 
there are also astonishing merits. To begin with — the 
play is full, from the first scene to the last, of the 
noblest poetry — poetry, that is ' simple, sensuous, im- 
passioned,' that sweeps the reader along in its resist- 
less course. It is verse of the kind that Wordsworth 
called 'inevitable;' every line fell into its place with- 
out the poet knowing how it came there. Alfred de 
Musset, according to tradition, would only write by 
fits and starts, and then with a blaze of light about 
him. One can imagine Marlowe working in the same 
way, throwing off scene after scene at white heat, 
never stopping to erase a single line. Hence, while 
much that he wrote bears the clearest marks of the 
author's haste and carelessness, the good — and the 
great body of Marlowe's poetry is supremely good — 
has the true ring of absolute spontaneity. The poetry 
comes welling up from the depths of the poet's heart 
— no tiny thread, whose every drop must be husbanded 
— but a rich, full stream. And poetry such as Tani- 
biirlaine contains was new to the stage. The melody 
was intoxicating. Putting aside for the present the 
question of metre, where in the contemporary drama 
shall we turn, with any hope of finding such lines as 



48 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

the following — sonorous as the notes of an organ, 
rhythmic as the ebb and flow of the sea-waves ? 

Tamburlainc. Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven 
As sentinels to warn the immortal souls, 
To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
Apollo, Cynthia, and the ceaseless lamps, 
That gently looked upon this loathsome earth, 
Shine downward now no more, but deck the heavens 
To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
The crystal springs, whose taste illuminates 
Refined eyes with an eternal light, 
Like tried silver, run through Paradise, 
To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
The Cherubins and holy Seraphins, 
That sing and play before the King of kings, 
Use all their voices and their instruments. 
To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
And in the sweet and curious harmony, 
The God that tunes this music to our souls, 
Holds out his hands in highest majesty, 
To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
Then let some holy trance convey my thoughts 
Up to the palace of the empyreal heaven 
That this my life may be as short to me, 
As are the days of sweet Zenocrate. Part ii. ii. 4. 

This is poetry without 'the difference.' Again, 
could Greene, or Peele, or Kydd, have written the 
dying speech of Zenocrate in the same scene .'' 

Zenocrate. Live still, my lord ! O let my sovereign live ! 
And sooner let the fiery element 
Dissolve and' make your kingdom in the sky, 
Than this base earth should shroud your majesty: 
For would I but suspect your death by mine, 
The comfort of my future happiness. 
Turned to despair, would break my wretched breast, 
And fury would confound my present rest. 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 49 

But let me die my love ; yet let me die ; 
With love and patience let your true love die! 
Your grief and fury hurts my second life — 
Yet let me kiss my lord before I die, 
And let me die with -kissing of my lord — 

The English stage had never rung to the rhythm 

of such periods. Against verse Hke this there could 

be no appeal. 

' His raptures were 
All air and fire ', 

says Drayton in the oft-quoted lines on Marlowe, 
and these simple words exactly sum up the poetical 
qualities which made Tajiiburiaine at the time of its 
appearance unique and epoch-making. It contained 
more genuine poetry than all previous dramas put 
together, from the first Miracle-Play down to the last 
piece of rhymed fustian, that Nash, or Peele, or Kydd, 
may have brought out, while Marlowe was busy on 
the work which was to raise him high over their heads. 
And if Marlowe rendered the stage a signal service 
in showing that the drama might be, and indeed 
thenceforth was bound to be, in the widest sense 
poetical, he did scarcely less good in definitely fixing 
the form or structure, which the drama should in the 
future adopt. He brings us in Tainburlaine straight 
into the presence of his characters. There are none 
of the ingenious contrivances of which contemporary 
plays are full, and which, as a rule, defeat their own 
end. These devices were numerous enough ; to see 
what they were, and how supremely ridiculous, we 
V. 4 



50 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

need only turn to the works of Greene and Peele, 
next to Marlowe the foremost writers of the time. In 
Greene's James IV. we have a play within a play, 
Bohan and Oberon keeping up a running commentary 
on the course of the piece. The Looking for London 
and England'^, is a perfect storehouse of crude incon- 
gruities. Oseas periodically appears to point the 
moral ; a good and an evil angel are introduced, the 
latter amongst other things tempting the usurer to 
kill himself, even 'offering the knife and rope,' as the 
stage-directions quaintly inform us, and yet one more 
absurdity from the same piece, a burning sword is let 
down from heaven. TJie Comical History of King 
AlpJionsus begins and ends with an assemblage of the 
Muses, and throughout Venus acts as a kind of 
chorus ; in Friar Bacon and Friar Bnngay the intro- 
duction of the supernatural is managed rather clumsily. 
Peele is quite as great an offender in these matters as 
Greene. The Arraignment of Paris is confessedly 
classical in subject and style, but even in a classical 
piece the entrance of Ate ('from the lowest hell') with 
a prologue in her hand seems a gratuitous absurdity. 
In Sir Clyomon and Clamydes'^ there are personifica- 
tions of Rumour and Providence, not indeed that 

^ Probably, however, Lodge was responsible for the greater part of 
this terrible 'Morality'. Dyce, Greene and Peele, p. 32. 

- Is it quite clear that this piece was by Peele? Mr Dyce says 'On the 
title-page of a copy of this play a MS. note in a very old hand attributes 
it to Peele, and I have no doubt rightly.' The evidence, as Mr Symonds 
says, does not seem- very conclusive ; there is one small point worth 



SHAKSPERES EARLIER STYLE. 51 



anything could possibly add to the faults of a piece of 
which one can only say that in point of dulness it is a 
case of Eclipse first and the rest nowhere. The Old 
Wives Talc deserves considerate handling as having 
not improbably suggested the idea of Milton's Covms; 
moreover it contains some pleasant scenes. But, like 
James IV., it is a play within a play and the device 
in the hands of Peele does not succeed. In David 
and Bethsabe we have a regular chorus ; in the Battle 
of Alcazar the action is eked out by the help of a 
Presenter, a Dumb-show, and Hercules and Jonah. 
Finally in Edivard I. an earthquake takes place by 
special request and gets rid of the Queen for an act 
or two, though she subsequently reappears through a 
detis ex machina-dev'xce which the dramatist does not 
stop to elucidate. All these artifices were mechanical 
and utterly clumsy, but none the less playwrights 
employed them as part of their legitimate dramatic 
machinery. Marlowe brushed them on one side, and 
rightly, for such contrivances can only produce a 
general effect of incongruity. No doubt some of the 
devices were effective enough, if sparingly used. In 
the VVintcy's Tale, for instance, the chorus is indispens- 

^ noticing. Some dramatists — notably Greene, as Mr Richard Grant White 
V)inted out in discussing the Henry VI. Parts II. and III. question — are 

|ry fond of the peculiar idiom 'for to' with an infinitive. Peele does 

It often employ it : there are only scattered instances in his works, e.g. 

[o in the Old Wives' Tale, three in the Arraigmnettt of Paris. In Sir 
voiuon and Sir Clamydcs — a very long piece it is true — I have noted 

Jar 70 examples. 

4—2 



52 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

able, and the same may be said of Henry V. Similarly 
A Midsummer Nighfs Dream — not to mention Hamlet 
and the Taming of a Shreiv — shows us what admirable 
effects may be attained by putting a play inside a 
play. But when such shifts were employed continually 
careless and incongruous work was the result, and 
everything that stands outside the main course of a 
play tends to create a feeling of unreality, precisely 
the danger against which a good dramatist guards. 
Hence it was an immense gain that in Tamburlaine 
the audience were brought at the outset into the pre- 
sence of the dramatis personae, that the action of the 
play developed naturally, that no chorus trotted in and 
out at odd moments, that in a word the piece possessed 
the primary elements of naturalness and reality. 

We may say, then, that Marlowe in giving poetry 
a place on the stage, and in laying down sound 
principles of dramatic structure, did no small service 
to the drama. But there is another point in Tambur- 
laine. The poet was trying a great experiment, and 
it was essential to the success of this attempt that the 
material out of which his play was constructed should 
possess the strongest elements of popularity; he was 
bound to interest the spectators. His choice of a 
subject was admirable. The story of Tamburlaine ir 
heroic, romantic, one that would naturally seize t^ 
attention of a large audience. The very extravagai^ 
of the piece — Tamburlaine's thirst for power — '^ 
sacrifice of all, even of his child, to the passion of '^ 



SHAA'SPEKE'S EARLIER STYLE. 53 

life, admitted of the sensational, melodramatic treat- 
ment that satisfied the craving for strong excitement 
natural to an English audience. He tells us in the 
prologue what we have to expect — 

'We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, 
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine : 
Threatening the world with high, astounding terms. 
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. 
View but his picture in this tragic glass 
And then applaud his fortune as you please.' 

This is the poet's promise, and it is amply fulfilled. 
After Tamhurlaijie there could be no question of any 
continuation of the Religious, or Classical drama. Both 
were routed, and still more important, the 'jigging 
veins ' and ' the conceits of clownage ' were likewise 
swept on one side. 

'Marlowe was trying a great experiment.' Like 
Polyphemus, who thoughtfully reserved Odysseus to 
the end of his banquet as a choice morsel, I have 
kept this point — the introduction of blank verse — to 
the last. Few questions in English literature are 
more interesting than the history of blank verse. 
The honour of having first employed this metre for 
dramatic purposes is usually given to Sackville and 
Norton; I think the credit belongs entirely to Marlowe. 

Let us consider the circumstances under which 
rhyme was discarded. Surrey \ in his translation of 

^ Vide what Meres, plagiarising from Ascham, says in Palladis 
Tamia of Surrey, who, by the way, called his own verse 'a strange 
metre', which it certainly was. 



54 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

the fourth book of the yEneid, was the first writer 
who ended his lines with a vacant or blank syllable. 
Probably the impulse came from Italy. Like Gas- 
coigne, Greene, Peele and many other writers, Surrey 
had travelled in that country, and there the transition 
from rhymed to unrhymed verse had long been effected. 
Trissino, the father of Italian tragedy, Rucellai, and 
other poets had all written the so-called versi sciolti\ 
The abandonment therefore of rhyme was due to ex- 
ternal circumstances ; in other words, it was artificial. 
But, although in all probability the example of Italian 
writers^ was the immediate cause of the change, yet 
the idea that rhyme was a barbarous survival sprang 
in either case from the classicism fostered by the 
Renaissance. ^Eschylus, Sophocles and the other 
Greek poets had not employed rhyme, the world 
recognised these writers as amongst the greatest, 
therefore rhyme was bad ; the argument seemed 
complete, totns teres atgne rotundus. 

We have several critical treatises on the subject 
by writers of the time, most of whom argue for the 
abolition of rhyme in favour of what they call the 
'Carmen iambicum,' their theory being that a metre 
can be transplanted from one language to another 
quite irrespectively of the inherent differences that 
may separate those languages. That is the view 

^ Cf. Symonds, Shakspere's Predecessors, p. 592. The Sophonisba of 
Trissino — praised by Pope — was produced in 15 15. 
^ Cf. Guest, History of English Rhythms, p. 528. 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 55 

advanced in Ascham's Schoolmaster. Ascham dis- 
cusses the rhyme question in a spirit of the very- 
narrowest pedantry, appeahng at every step to the 
classical writers, precisely as Meres in his Palladis 
Tamia begins each paragraph with the inevitable ' As 
Homer,' or ' As Sophocles,' etc., ' So Chaucer,' etc. — 
And it is the same with the other critics. Puttenham\ 
for instance, speaks of the ' rhyming poesie of the 
barbarians,' and in his sixth chapter (Book I.) explains 
how it was that the idea of rhymed compositions first 
arose, with all the disastrous results that followed 
thereupon. Again in Webbe's Discourse of English 
Poetry^ (1586), rhyme is indifferently called 'tinkerly 
verse,' 'brutish poesie,' and 'a great decay of that good 
order of versifying,' the moral of Webbe's criticism 
being, that poets should follow the Greek model and 
eschew everything but classical metres. In a later 
work. Campion's Art of English Poesie^, 1602, we 
have specimens of two kinds of iambic lines — the 
' iambic pure,' and the ' licentiate iambic' The argu- 
ments of these several writers were all variations on 
the same note, the gist of their criticisms simply 
amounting to this, that the only true authorities on 

1 Haslewood, I. p. 7 — 9. 

2 Ibid. II. p. 55. 

3 Haslewood, 11. As a specimen of the 'pure iamliic' Campion (p. 
168) gives the following line: 

'The more secure the more the stroke we feel.' 
This, he says, is a 'licentiate iambic' — 

'Hark how these winds do murmur at thy flight.' 



56 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

questions of literary form and taste were the classical 
writers, that there could be no departure from the 
critical canons they observed, that a rhythm which 
suited the peculiar character of the Greek language 
would (in the face of facts) suit the English, that 
therefore these classical metres should be introduced 
and native metres discarded in their favour — or, as 
Ascham puts it — poets should 'leave off their rude 
barbariousness in rhyming and follow diligently the 
excellent Greek and Latin examples in true versify- 
ing.' These doctrines were widely spread. Critics 
affected to look with contempt on the English 
language and on its metres. On the one hand Philip 
Sidney and his little Academe^ were making heroic 
efforts to introduce unrhymed hexameters and sap- 
phics into English literature. This was ' artificial 
versifying,' and it was doomed to failure. Such 
metres depend on quantity, and for quantity the 
English language can only offer the poor substitute 
of accent. On the other hand, the purely scholastic 
critics approached their mother tongue in the spirit of 
Holofernes, who was 'a scholar at the least.' They 
were bent on subjecting native rhythms to elaborate 
rules drawn from their study of classical models. 
They did not stop to reflect that the poetry of a 
nation grows with the language, that the metrical 
forms most suited to the peculiarities of the language 

1 Even Spenser was guilty of dabbling in these pseudo-classical 
metres. Cf. Church's Spenser ('English Men of Letters' Series) p. 27. 



SUA AS PE RE'S EARLIER STYLE. $7 



survive, while others die out, or remain unattempted 
altogether, that, in short, metrically, whatever is is 
best, and that 'one language', as Johnson says, 'cannot 
communicate its rules to another'. They found the 
normal heroic line of five feet 'the standard metre of 
serious English poetry, in epic story, idyll, satire, 
drama, elegy and meditative lyric' It was one of the 
oldest metres. It had been used by various writers 
in various combinations, by Chaucer in the couplet 
and rime royal \ by Surrey and other poets in the 
sonnet, by Spenser in the stanzas of the Faery Queen. 
But in every case the lines had rhymed. Never, 
until Surrey made the innovation, had the last foot 
been left blank or unrhymed. But Surrey's abandon- 
ment of rhyme seemed a decided step in advance. 
The heroic line — minus the rhyme — was somewhat 
like the Greek iambic line, and the critics thought 
that they could make the resemblance still stronger. 
There were, of course, certain difficulties in the way. 
To begin with, the heroic line is shorter by a whole 
foot than the Greek senarius^ a fact which was con- 
veniently ignored. Again — and this was the serious 
stumbling-block — the Greek iambus, like all Greek 

1 i.e. the ballet stave of 8 lines. Guest, bk. iv. chap. v. Cf. 
Shakspere's Predecessors, p. 591. 

^ Daniel in his Defence of Rhyme notes this point. 'For what', he 
says, 'do we have here, what strange precept of art about the forming 
of an iambic verse in our language, which, when all is done, reaches not 
by a foot, but falleth out to be the plain Ancient Verse, consisting of 10 
syllables or 5 feet, which hath been used among us time out of mind.' 



58 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

metres, is based on the quantitative structure. But 
the Enghsh language does not admit in its prosody 
the idea of quantity at all ; hence the impossibility of 
applying to the English heroic line the system of 
scansion by quantity. All rhythmic effects in English 
verse rest on the principle of accent, so the scholastic 
critics decided that an unaccented syllable should 
represent a short syllable, and, contrarily, an accented, 
a long syllable ; in this way they hoped to overcome 
the quantitative difficulty. Now, as long as a writer, 
following this principle, alternated an unaccented with 
an accented syllable, he could produce pure iambic 
lines of five feet, each foot being an iambus, and each 
line ending, on X.\\& classical model, with a syllable 
counted long, the tendency obviously being to isolate 
the lines. But further than this he could not venture. 
Once abandon this normal structure, and he was 
certain to break his prescribed rules. The result was 
obvious. The English iambic line was infinitely 
poorer than the Greek iambic line. How could it be 
otherwise } The Greek dramatist was not bound to 
have an iambus in every foot. In the first, third, and 
fifth places other feet were admissible. He could 
vary his lines by the introduction of tribrachs, ana- 
paests, dactyls and spondees ; a trochee he could not 
use. Consequently the trochee could find no place in 
the English iambic line of these Elizabethan critics, 
and yet there is no foot that English poetry admits 
more readily, a signal proof of the futility of attempt- 



SHAKSFEI^E'S EARLIER STYLE. 59 

ing to impose upon one language the rules of another. 
Thus the English iambic failed to reproduce any of 
the richness and rhythm of the Greek iambic — quali- 
ties directly traceable to the peculiarities of the Greek 
language — and at the same time it lacked the old 
charm which it had derived from the genuinely English 
principle of rhyme. The critics in short had fallen 
between two stools. As the result of these various 
shifts and expedients they had produced a metre 
which was limited to one foot, and proportionately 
monotonous. To prove this, one need only quote a 
passage from Goi'bodtic. Here is an extract from 
Videna's speech at the beginning of the fourth Act — 
one of the most vigorous in the play — 

'Why should I live and linger forth my time, 
In longer life to double my distress? 
O me most woeful wight ! whom no mishap 
Long ere this day could have bereaved hence, 
Mought not these hands by fortune or by fate 
Have pierced this breast, and life with iron reft? 
Or in this palace here where I so long 
Have spent my days, could not that happy hour 
Once, once have happ'd, in which those hugy frames 
With deathly fall might have oppressed me? 
Or should not this most hard and cruel soil, 
So oft where I have pressed my wretched steps. 
Some time had ruth of mine accursed life 
To rend in twain and swallow me therein. 
So had my bones possessed now in peace 
Their happy grave within the closed ground 
And greedy worms had gnawed this pined heart 
Without my feeling pain.' 

This is indeed 'the even road "of a blank verse.' The 



6o MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

only objection to such lines is that we never leave 
the level ground. It is the monotony of a Cambridge- 
shire landscape. We can hardly wonder that any 
theory which led to the production of such verse 
should have been fiercely assailed. The rhymed 
couplet was not suitable for use on the stage, but 
this hybrid line with its solitary foot\ its almost 
invariable pause at the end of the fourth syllable, 
and the repeated monosyllabic ending'', was infinitely 
worse. The heroic couplet could at least claim to be 
considered poetry, but who would undertake to define 
its successor } The latter simply represented the 
apotheosis of pedantry. 

The fetters of rhyme therefore had been broken 
without any good result following. Playwrights were 
no nearer than before to a solution of the problem — 
what was the most fitting vehicle of dramatic ex- 
pression. The tyranny of the iambic was worse than 
the tyranny of rhyme. And there could be no pro- 

1 What Gascoigne said in his ^ Notes of Instruction, Concerning the 
making of Verse or Ryine in English'', 1575, is perfectly true. 'Note 
you that commonly nowadays in English rimes (for I dare not call them 
verses), we use none other order but a foot of two syllables, whereof the 
first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevate or made long, 
and that sound or scanning continueth through the Verse... and surely I 
can lament that we are fallen into such a plain and simple manner of 
writing that there is none other foot used but one.' Gascoigne was no 
champion of rhyme ; he merely protested against the tyranny of this 
solitary, iambic foot. Haslewood, 11. 

^ Thus in the above passage of iS lines there are 14 monosyllabic 
endings. 



SHAA'SFEKE'S EARLIER STYLE. 6 1 

gress until some poet should arise, who taking the 
old heroic line, could free it alike from the bonds of 
the couplet and from the classical rules imposed upon 
it. This Christopher Marlowe did. He borrowed the 
heroic line, and in his hands the instrument was 
touched to nobler issues than hitherto. He created a 
verse system radically different from the verse of 
Gorboduc. In the latter the couplet, or perhaps the 
single line was the unit ; in blank verse proper the 
whole paragraph is the unit. And herein lies its 
merit. The central idea of a speech in Shakspere is 
progress. All thought is progressive, or at least all 
thought passes through different stages. Now blank 
verse above all verse is best calculated to express the 
transitions of spoken thought, because changes passing 
in the speaker's mind are expressed by changes in the 
time and rhythm of his words. The basis of blank 
verse, as of all English prosody, is accent, and accent 
is only another form of emphasis. A speaker by 
means of emphasis, by means of variety in the pause, 
by means of accelerated and slackened rhythm can 
give perfect expression to everything that directs the 
train of his thoughts. The verse, in a word, reflects 
every shade of his meaning. The distribution of the 
rests, the incidence of the accent can emphasise the 
relative importance of his sentences. The thought 
conveyed, and the language in which it is conveyed, 
go side by side. Blank verse, to employ a simile, is 
like the drapery that a sculptor chisels round a 



62 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

statue ; it clothes the thought, or, to vary the simile, 
we may say that a paragraph of blank verse resembles 
the human hand. The internal system of the lines in 
themselves — the accent, the pause, and the rhythm — 
represents the structure of bones and sinew that con- 
stitute the framework of the hand ; the thought that 
vivifies and penetrates every syllable of the speech is 
parallel to the blood that reaches into every crevice 
of the member, making the whole living, united, 
supple. No one understood the art of merging the 
thought in its expression better than Milton. ' In 
the flow' — says Dr Guest^ — 'of his rhythm, in the 
quality of his letter-sounds, in the disposition of his 
pauses, his verse almost ever fits the subject. And 
so insensibly does poetry blend with this, the last 
beauty of exquisite versification, that the reader 
sometimes doubts whether it be the thought itself, or 
merely the happiness of its expression, which is the 
source of a gratification so deeply felt.' Dr Guest, 
however, goes on to blame Milton for his 'unsettled 
accentuation,' for ' running the verses one into the 
otherV and observes, ' few readers are to be met with, 
who can make the beginning or the ending of Milton's 
lines perceptible to the audience.' This, he says, 
may be a beauty, but it is beyond the legitimate 
range of metre. ' Versification ceases to be a science, 

1 Guest's English Rhythms, p. 530. 

- In the same way Daniel in his Defence of Ryme, objects to the 
'boundless running on of the classics.' 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 



if its laws may be thus lightly broken.' It is of 
course only a repetition of Johnson's well-known 
criticism, that ' the variety of pauses, so much boasted 
by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures 
of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer.' 
Johnson meant this sentence to be a reproach. 
As a matter of fact he sums up with admirable 
terseness the peculiar excellence of blank verse. It 
is essentially rhetorical, and consequently, whatever 
its fitness or unfitness for purposes of epic narration, 
it is^ indisputably the best of all metres as a means of 
dramatic expression. It can approximate to the prose 
of every-day life without losing its dignity as poetry ; 
it can give the natural rhythm of conversation, and 
yet remain verse. But obviously all depends on the 
actor's, or reader's, fineness of ear. A line may be 
deficient by a syllable, lacking, as is often the case in 
Marlowe's verse, the initial syllable, or it may be 
redundant, having a syllable packed in the middle, 
or — as in Fletcher's plays — an extra emphatic syllable 
at the end — or an ordinary 'feminine' ending — or the 
verse may be an apparent Alexandrine, or — in short, it 
may represent any one of the various departures from 
the normal blank verse line employed by dramatists ; 
but in such cases examination will show that, though 
the number of syllables be defective, or redundant, 
yet the sound, regulated by the sense of the line — is 
in one case sufficient, in the other not really excessive. 
To say this now is to repeat the merest common- 



64 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

place. But we must remember who it was that first 
introduced these apparent irregularities, who first 
developed the ' licenciate iambic ' — who, in a word, 
first conceived a true idea of the metrical beauty, to 
which blank verse might properly attain. In verse of 
the Gorhodiic type there was nothing but lifeless 
monotony — almost each line was isolated, certainly 
each couplet. At the very outset therefore it was 
clear, that such verse could never be suitable for the 
stage. There can be no true evolution of thought in 
single lines ; ideas are splintered into fragments. 
This had been the great fault of the rhymed couplet ; 
each pair of lines was complete in itself. The 
characters talked in epigrams, because what they 
wished to say had continually to be concentrated 
within the narrow limits of the two lines. It is the 
flaw in Shakspere's earliest plays. The dialogue is 
too sharp and pointed ; there is none of the dififuseness, 
the easy expansiveness of natural conversation. And 
similarly in longer speeches a finicking metre which 
brings the speaker to a close at the end of every line, 
or pair of lines, precludes a large and gradual flow of 
ideas. What is passing in the character's mind must 
be twisted and strained to suit the requirements of the 
metre. Thought expressed in blank verse, such as 
Shakspere wrote in the later plays, resembles the flow 
of a stately stream ; thought expressed in rhymed 
couplets is like a brook that foams and frets at each 
rock in its course, at every turn in its twisted 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 65 

channel. As for the metre of Gorbodiic, the expres- 
sion of thought in such Hnes is almost impossible — 
the movement of the verse is the motion of a stagnant 
river, that barely progresses at all. After listening 
to the play, the audience might well have said with 
Jaques, ' Nay, then, God be wi'you, an you talk in 
blank verse.' But Marlowe flung to the winds all 
rules. He transformed the ' drumming decasyllabon;' 
he introduced the hitherto forbidden trochees and 
other feet. His lines were sometimes deficient by a 
syllable, sometimes redundant; they were 'unstopt.' 
There was no longer the invariable pause after the 
fourth syllable ; the single couplet was no longer the 
unit. The emphasis fell naturally on the right words, 
and the lines were combined into periods through 
which the sense could develope in easy transitions, 
'variously drawn out,' to speak with Milton — 'from 
one verse into another\' The sound was an echo 
to the sense. The rhythm perpetually changed — 
Mift upward and divine,' to echo the passions of 
Tamburlaine ; swift, broken abrupt to ring the deso- 
lation, the despair that closes over Faustus, in that 
terrible ' last scene of all ' ; sonorous and sad to tell 
the tragedy of Marlowe's King. And so in his first 
play the poet could give us lines like these, 

If all the pens that ever poets held 

Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, 

^ This 'boundless running,' as Daniel terms it, has well been called 
the 'overflow' : Shakespeare to Pope, p. 6. 

V. q 



^ MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

And every sweetness that inspired their hearts 
Their minds and muses on admired themes : 
If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
The highest reaches of a human wit. 
If these had made one poem's period, 
And all combined in beauty's worthiness. 
Yet should there hover in their restless head 
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least 
Which into words no virtue can digest. 

Mr Swinburne* in one of his essays takes four lines 
from Wordsworth's poem ' The SoHtary Reaper.' 

Will no one tell me what she sings? 
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
For old unhappy far off things 
And battles long ago. 

If, he says, all that Wordsworth ever wrote had 
perished, with the exception of this half stanza, yet 
the poet's name must have been immortal. These 
few verses were enough to keep fresh the fame of any 
writer. May not the same be said of the passage 
from Marlowe quoted above .'' If of Marlowe's plays 
not one had survived, if Hero and Leander had sunk 
into the waters of oblivion under the weight of 
Chapman's continuation of the original, if the two or 
three lyrics (' old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good') 
that we possess, had gone the way that the other 
lyrical poems which he must have written were 
doomed to go, still these 13 lines of blank verse, 

1 This was written before contending critics had crushed all the 
poetry out of the hapless half-stanza. 



SHAA'SPEKE'S EARLIER STYLE. ^7 

enshrined in one of the many anthologies of the 
time, would surely have been sufficient to prove that 
a true poet had lived, and suffered, and sung, and 
been forgotten. The instrument which contented 
Norton and Sackville, and the court audiences, could 
give forth a solitary note. The instrument created by 
Marlowe could ring out, at the touch of its master, 
the full diapason of an organ. It is possible that 
Bottom, who had * a reasonable good ear in music,' 
might have traced some connection between the two. 
Ben Jonson exactly described (Schlegel notwith- 
standing) the main characteristics of the poet's verse, 
when he spoke of Marlowe's ' mighty line.' As a rule, 
such epigrammatic definitions are not very satisfactory. 
Attempts to label a writer's work with a convenient 
reference-phrase usually mean that one aspect of his 
character is emphasised and brought into relief at the 
expense of the rest ; side points must perforce be left 
out of sight. But ' mighty ' perfectly expresses, so far 
as any one epithet can express, the peculiar quality of 
Marlowe's poetry. It is in what Mr Matthew Arnold 
calls the 'grand style,' and of this style the last lines 
that I quoted are an admirable specimen. It would 
be a mistake however to suppose that the poet always 
wrote in this vein. On the contrary, his verse displays, 
especially in his best work, Edivard the Second, con- 
siderable variety. He handles the metre with con- 
summate ease, and the secret of his rhythmic effects 
lies in the skill with which the movement of the lines 

5—2 



68 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

is always adapted to the subject. Here is a passage 
that might, as Mr BuUen says, have come out of 
Paradise Lost. 

The galleys and those pilling brigandines 

That yearly sail to the Venetian Gulf, 

And hover in the straits for Christian wreck, 

Shall lie at anchor in the isle Asant, 

Until the Persian fleet and men of war, 

Sailing along the oriental sea, 

Have fetched about the Indian Continent 

Even from Persepolis to Mexico 

And thence unto the straits of Jubalter. 

Tamlmrlainc, Part I. iii. 3, 248 — i^^. 

' Sailing along the oriental sea ' — the subtle swing 
of the line is perfectly expressive of the easy motion 
of a fleet. We have the same kind of effect in a 
passage in the Jciu of Malta, i. I. 41. 

Why then I hope my ships 
I sent for Egypt and the bordering isles 
Are gotten up by Nilus winding banks : 
Mine Argosy from Alexandria, 
Loaden with spice and silk, now under sail, 
Are smoothly gliding down by Candy shore 
To Malta, through our Mediterranean Sea. 

Here again the smooth rapidity of the last line 
and a half exactly suggests the idea of a ship under 
canvas ; on the other hand, the laboured effect of the 
third verse is noticeable. 

Earlier in the same speech occurs the following 
remarkable paragraph : 

Give me the merchants of the Indian mines 
That trade in metal of the purest mould; 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 69 

The wealthy Moor, that in the Eastern rocks 
Without control can pick his riches up, 
And in his house heap pearls like pebble stones, 
Receive them free and sell them by the weight. 
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts. 
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds. 
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, 
And seld seen costly stones. 

Lines more hopelessly irregular according to the 
principles laid down in Gorboduc it would be difficult 
to conceive. ' Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,' 
the effect is as beautiful as it was original ; the 
description seems to reflect the light flashing from 
the facets of the gems ; we are dazzled by the com- 
bination of words. The Tragedy of Dido contains at 
least half a dozen remarkable lines with the true 
Marlowesque ring. 

Then he unlocked the horse ; and suddenly. 

From out his entrails, Neoptolemus, 

Setting his spear upon the ground, leapt forth, 

And after him a thousand Grecians more 

In whose stern faces shined the quenchless fire 

That after burnt the pride of Asia.' ii. i, 183 — 88. 

The resistless sweep of these verses, an effect 
altogether beyond the reach of Nash, vividly repro- 
duces the action described ; even the epithet ('quench- 
less') is characteristic. Again in the same scene the 
poet has a fine combination of monosyllables. 

And, as he spoke, to further his intent, 

The winds did drive huge billows to the shore, 

And heaven was darkened with tempestuous clouds. 

(139— 141). 



70 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

In the movement of the second line one seems to 
catch an echo of the rush and roar of the actual waves. 
This play exhibits a curious phenomenon in the poet's 
handling of the blank verse, viz. a return at times to 
the structure of the old couplet. As a specimen, the 
following speech will serve. 

Aeneas, I'll repair thy Trojan ships, 

Conditionally, that thou wilt stay with me, 

And let Achates sail to Italy: 

I'll give thee tackling made of rivelled gold. 

Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees; 

Oars of massy ivory, full of holes, 

Through which the water shall delight to play; 

Thy anchors shall be hewed from crystal rocks, 

Which, if thou lose, shall shine above the waves ; 

The masts, whereon thy swelling sails shall hang. 

Hollow pyramides of silver plate; 

The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought 

The wars of Troy — but not Troy's overthrow. 

This passage, as Mr Symonds points out, is not at 
all in Marlowe's usual, or at any rate later, style. It 
is only blank verse in the sense that there are no 
rhymes. As an explanation it may be worth while 
to suggest that the play was written while Marlowe 
was busy with the composition of his incomparable 
Hero and Leander. The latter was entered at 
Stationers' Hall 1593; the Tfagedy of Dido was 
published 1594. As I said before, both are really 
love-poems, and the passage just quoted is exactly 
such a description as might have occurred in Hei^o and 
Leander. Perhaps it is not unnatural to suppose that 



SHAI^'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 71 

the poet in writing the drama would occasionally glide 
into the couplet form employed in the sister-poem. 

It is in Edivard II. that Marlowe's power of 
writing vigorous blank verse in dialogue is best seen. 
His handling of the metre in Tamburlainc was a little 
stiff. The lines lacked flexibility. The characters 
resembled mediseval warriors in complete, but some- 
what unwieldy suits of mail. But against Edward 
II. no such reproach can be made. He had acquired 
a perfect mastery over his weapon ; the verse was 
supple and pliant in his hands. To borrow Johnson's 
famous remark about Milton, the poet could, if he 
wished, carve the daintiest work on a cherrystone, 
and this command of the metre is naturally most 
conspicuous in the dialogue. The difficulty of writing 
lines that should have all the naturalness of conversa- 
tion without ceasing to be poetical, was of course 
great, especially at the outset, when the resources of 
blank verse remained comparatively undeveloped. 
In this art of reconciling the simplicity that is es- 
sential to really good dialogue with the dignity of 
verse, Shakspere is unapproachable. Dekker, accord- 
ing to Coleridge, comes next. But Shakspere and 
the other dramatists in this, as in other respects, only 
reaped the fruit of what Marlowe had previously 
done. If we turn to Ediuaj'd II. we find that the 
dialogue is wonderfully strong. All through the 
scenes where the king disputes with his courtiers the 
verse is marked by animation and firmness. Take, 



72 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

for instance, a passage like the following in the first 
act ; it is a fair specimen. 

Edw. What are you moved that Gaveston sits here? 

It is our pleasure, and we will have it so — 
Lan. Your Grace doth well to place him by your side, 

For nowhere else the new Earl is so safe. 
E. Mo7-t. What man of noble birth can brook this sight? 

See what a scornful look the peasant casts. 
Pevib. Can kingly lions fawn on creeping ants. 

War. Ignoble vassal, that, like Phaeton, 

Aspir'st unto the guidance of the sun. 
Y. Mo7-t. Their downfall is at hand, their forces down : 

We will not thus be faced and overpeered. 
Edzv. Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer ! 

Mart. Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston ! 

Kent. Is this the duty that you owe your king? 

War. We know our duties, let him know his peers. 

Edtv. Whither will you bear him? stay, or ye shall die. 

E. Mart. We are no traitors, therefore threaten not. 
Gav. No, threaten not, my lord, but pay them home: 

Were I a king — 
Y. Mart. Thou villain, wherefore talk'st thou of a king 

That hardly art a gentleman by birth? 
Ed%v. Were he a peasant, being my minion 

I'll make the proudest of you stoop to him. i. 4. 

It seemed to me necessary to dwell at some length 
on Marlowe's introduction of blank verse — as we 
understand blank verse — and, in doing so, to draw- 
freely on his works for quotation. After all, it was 
in enriching the stage with a metre, which for dra- 
matic purposes is incomparable, that Marlowe con- 
ferred on English literature the most signal and 
sovereign benefit. His creation of blank verse, for 
the transfiguration that the verse of Gorboduc under- 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 73 

went in his hands was nothing short of a creation, was, 
one might almost say, a vindication of the dignity 
and resource of the English language and of English 
metres. What Spenser was doing for poetry in 
general, Marlowe did (without Spenser's affectation 
of antiquarianism) for dramatic poetry in particular. 
He proved that men could give up their perpetual 
appeal to the classics, that if they wanted inspiration 
there was plenty to be found nearer home, that 
attempts to revive classical metres were futile, if not 
something worse ; above all, that the language of 
Chaucer was really a very effective instrument when 
handled by a man of genius. 

And there is one more point in Marlowe's work — 
he created, in Edward II., the first genuine his- 
torical play. Chronicle plays like The Famous 
Victories of Henry the Fifth certainly could lay no 
claim to this title — they were not dramas at all\ 

^ With regard to the early Historical Shaksperian plays, I Henry VI., 
which Professor Dovvden assigns to the 'Pre-Shaksperian Group,' 1590 — • 
91, i.e. only retouched by Shakspere, is clearly only a good specimen — 
good, because of two or three fine scenes, added by Shakspere— of the 
Chronicle Play proper. There is also the 'Marlowe-Shakspere' group. 
Whatever theory be adopted as to the authorship of Henry VI. Parts 
n. and hi., and The Contention, and True Tragedy, these plays do not 
I think mark any decided advance on the Chronicle history. They lack 
the unity of purpose, the continuous dramatic interest essential to a 
genuine drama. There is the widest possible gulf between them and 
the true historical drama of which Edivard II. was the earliest specimen, 
the drama which Shakspere carried further in Richard II. and King 
yohn, and brought to its fullest development in his trilogy of Henry IV. 
Parts II. and in., and Henry V. There is one other play belonging to 



74 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

The writers merely strung together with the loosest 
possible thread of interest a series of historical scenes ; 
the action dragged over a long space of time, there 
was no coherence of parts, and in the end it was 
discovered that after all the piece had been leading 
no whither. Infinitely better to my mind than the 

the Marlowe- Shakspere group, viz. Richard III. Various dates are 
assigned to its production. Mr Fleay says 'probably 1595' {Shakespeare 
Manual, p. 31); Professor Dowden gives 1593. In the Clarendon 
Press edition the date 1593 or 1594 is 'conjecturally' assigned to it 
(Introduction, p. v). Now Edzuard II. was entered at Stationers' Hall 
July 6, 1593, and may well have been produced some time earlier. 
Warton, for instance, definitely states that it "was written in the year 
1590"; unfortunately he does not give any evidence in support of his 
statement. Perhaps 1591 — 92 would be a fair date to assign. In this 
way it would have preceded Richard III, as it obviously did Richard II. 
It may be worth while to note that we could fix the date of Edzvard II. 
at least as early as 1593 (independently of the fact that Marlowe died in 
that year) from what appears to me to be an obvious reference to the 
play in Peele's Order of the Garter (1593). Peele has these lines: 

And Mortimer a gentle trusty lord. 

More loyal than that cruel Mortimer, 

That plotted Edward's death at Chillingworth, 

Edward the Second, father to this King, 

Whose tragic cry even now viethinks I hear, 

When graceless wretches murdered him by night. 

Surely these lines refer to Marlowe's play, especially as Peele mentions 
Marlowe in the prologue ; I have not seen the point noticed. Peele, by 
the way, puts the death of Edward at Kenilworth. May he not be 
following Marlowe's account, and may not the editors be wrong in giving 
Berkeley as the scene in Act v. s. 7? At the end of scene 3. 49, Edward 
is taken to Kenilworth ; from that point to the murder scene we do not 
hear of his leaving the Castle, cf. however, v. 2. 63. Marlowe, we may 
remember, was careless about such historical points. Cf. Act 11. in the 
same play, scene 2. 188 — 193 and Mr Fleay's note. 



SHAA'S PERKS EARLIER STYLE. 75 

ordinary chronicle-histories are Peek's Edivard /., 
and Greene's James IV.; the only two plays that 
approximated at all to the form of drama initiated in 
Edward II. But neither is to be compared to Mar- 
lowe's work. James IV., as we have said, is a play 
within a play, and that alone is enough to condemn 
the piece: the historical of all forms of drama requires 
the simplest and most realistic presentment. More- 
over the play is really a love-story ; it reads like the 
dramatisation of some old Scottish ballad, where true 
love is faithful to the last and has its reward. Doro- 
thea and Ida are the characters that interest us ; the 
king is a mere puppet. Some fragments, too, of the 
old 'jigging wits' cling to the piece. As Bohan says 
at the end of Act III. 

The rest is ruthful, yet to beguile the time, 
Tis interlaced with merriment and rhyme. 

On the same level as Greene's work stands Peele's 
Edward I, printed 1593. Mr Dyce calls it 'one of 
the earliest of our chronicle-histories.' It seems to 
me decidedly better in many respects than the ordi- 
nary chronicle-play ; it represents a definite effort to 
write a consecutive, coherent drama. But Peele's 
attempt falls far short of Marlowe's achievement. 
The dramatist displays no sense of proportion and 
but little power of characterisation, the scene changes 
with bewildering frequency, and the incidents are 
often grotesque, or brutal, or both. And yet these 



T^ MARLOWE'' S INFLUENCE ON 

two pieces, James IV. and Edward 1} may fairly, I 
think, be regarded as at least equal to anything 
approximating to the historical drama that had been 

1 It is by no means quite clear that either of these dramas preceded 
Edivard IL I take them however as typical plays to show what the 
best playwrights of the time — Marlowe excepted — could, or rather could 
not, do. With regard to James IV. it must have been written at least 
as early as 1592, as that was the year of Greene's death.- It was pub- 
lished in 1598. Edzvard II. was printed 1593. "It may be reasonably 
conjectured that it was played some years before it was published." 
Collier, iii. 198. The writer of the Article in the Quarterly Review 
(October 1885) strongly expresses the opinion that Edward I. was 
written before Edivard II. I have noticed a curious case of plagiarism 
in the two plays, though which dramatist was the plagiarist we cannot 
say ; it is this : 

Peele has (Dyce's Edition, p. 413) the following lines: 
Unhappy king, dishonoured is thy stock — 
Hence feigned weeds, unfeigned is my grief. 
Compare this with Edward II. iv. 6, 96, 

Sweet Spenser, gentle Baldock, part we must— 
Hence feigned weeds, unfeigned are my woes. 
It is obvious that one writer — which, we do not know — has plagiarised 
from the other. A somewhat similar instance occurs in Peele's 'David 
and Bethsabe', where we have the line (p. 465) 

'And makes their weapons wound the senseless winds.' 
This is clearly an imitation of Marlowe's 

'And make your strokes to wound the senseless light', 

Taviburlaine., iii. 3, 158. 

That David and Bethsabe was written after the production of Tam- 

bitrlaine is obvious from the verse : in David and Bethsabe occurs the 

well-known simile (p. 473) taken from the Faery Queen, bk i. canto 5, 2. 

And yet one more instance of 'conveying'; in Anglonmi Ferice 

(1595) the expression 

' the rising sun 

Gallops the zodiac in his fiery wain' 
is strongly suggestive of Titus Androniciis, II. i, 7. 



SHAKSFEJ^E'S EARLIER STYLE. 77 

written previous to the production of Edzvard II. 

But with that play an immense advance was made. 

Edward II. exhibits Marlowe's powers as a dramatist 

at their highest. The play is full of sober strength, 

very different from the Titanic force that overflowed 

in Tanibnrlainc. The characters stand out in the 

boldest relief; their motives are clearly defined, and 

the events of the drama_are made to flow naturally 

from one central cause. The whole action oi Edzvard 

II. turns on the king's abuse — infatuated abuse — of 

his power. Edward has no sense of the difficulties of 

his position ; he resolutely shuts his eyes to the 

harshness of facts. He is a king, and will suffer no 

limitation of his prerogative — ' Am I a king, and 

must be overruled,' is his perpetual reply to all 

objections, and this point, emphasized at the outset, 

is never lost sight of. 'A wide gulf of time has to 

be bridged over, but the poet connects the two parts 

of his play with marked skill. In the first two acts 

Gaveston is the cause of dissension between the king 

and his nobles : in the third and fourth acts, up to 

the point where the king is defeated and deposed, 

the Spencers take the place of Gaveston. ^AVhen 

Gaveston is first banished Edward exclaims, 

And thou must hence, or I shall be deposed. 
But I will reign to be revenged on them. ^ 

And he is as good as his word. He determines to 
vindicate his own honour — for Edward never forgets 
that he is a king — and to avenge the wrong done to 



78 MA I? LOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

his friend. But fate is too strong for him. Gaveston 
returns, only to be eventually taken and killed, and 
again the king swears a solemn revenge. 

Edward. By Earth the common mother of us all, 

By heaven, and all the moving orbs thereof, 
By this right hand, and by my father's sword, 
And all the honours 'longing to my crown, 
I will have lives and heads for him, as many 
As I have manors, castles, towns and towers. 

And in this place of honour and of trust, 
Spencer, sweet Spencer, I adopt thee here : 
And merely of our love we do create thee 
Earl of Gloucester, and Lord Chamberlain, 
Despite of times, despite of enemies." 

With the blind tenacity of a weak nature he clings 
desperately to his purpose. He refuses to dismiss the 
Spencers at the demand of the barons ; they are 
installed as his favourites, and thus we have the re- 
quired balance between the two divisions of the play. 
From this point Edward's character is worked out on 
the same lines. When fortune declares for him, al- 
most his first words are — 

Methinks you hang the heads. 
But we'll advance them, traitors: now 'tis time 
To be avenged on you for all your braves, 
And for the murder of my dearest friend. 

Here again he strikes the two keynotes of the piece, 
vindication of his honour, fidelity to his friends. But 
once more his purpose is defeated. The barons 
escape; Edward has to fight for his throne, and at 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 79 

last is beaten, and even then his chief sorrow seems 
to spring from the parting with his favourites. 

Sweet Spencer ! gentle Baldock, part we must ! 

And go I must. Life, farewell with my friends. 

He loses them : he loses all hope of revenge, and 
thus the secondary theme of the drama is exhausted, 
and the poet returns to his original motive, the king's 
exaggerated conception of his kingship. Throughout 
the fifth act it is developed with surpassing power and 
impressiveness^ ' Professor Dowden speaks somewhat 
contemptuously of Edivard II. as being ' rather a 
series of scenes from the chronicles of England than 
a drama.' I cannot help dissenting from this view. 
Edward the Second seems to me, and I am merely 
repeating what critics (from Charles Lamb to Mr 
Swinburne) have said, to be a play of remarkable 
power ; finely conceived, and finely carried out. It is 
not merely an enormous advance on everything of 
the kind that had preceded it — the piece can bear 
comparison with Shakspere. Marlowe here, if not in 
his earlier dramas, displays a really great imaginative 
faculty. We have no longer a play with but one 
character ; the action is not dominated by a single 
passion. True, everything primarily springs from 
Edward's infatuated conception of his power as king. 
It is this (and his weakness) that makes him foist his 
favourites on the court, and that in turn leads to the 
struggles with the jealous nobles. But all through 



8o MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

there is complexity of motive, and all through it is 
quite clear what the different characters are striving 
for. And of these dramatis personae at least three are 
finely drawn, Edward himself, on whom we have 
already touched sufficiently, Mortimer, and Gaveston, 
The last is a ' peevish Frenchman,' fond in a way of 
Edward, but determined to push his own interests 
through the weakness of the king ; defiant in the 
presence of the barons and ready * to pay them home,' 
he remains reckless and jaunty to the last, even when 
he sees 

That heading is one, and hanging is the other, 

And death is all. ii. 5, 27 — 29. 

It is a fine touch that, the last words which 
Gaveston speaks in the play refer to his master : 

'Treacherous Earl, shall I not see the king?' iii. i, 15.^ 
Not less vigorous is the portrait of Mortimer, the 
terribly stern unyielding man, who never turns aside 
from the path of ambition, pursuing to the end his 
' deep-engendered schemes,' and passing at last from 
the stage with stoical submission : 

Base fortune, now I see that in thy wheel 
There is a point, to which when men aspire, 
They tumble headlong down : that point I touched, 
And seeing there was no place to mount up higher, 
Why should I grieve at my declining fall? 
Farewell, fair queen : weep not for Mortimer, 
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller. 
Goes to discover countries yet unknown. 

There is one decidedly weak point in the play, and 
that is the portrait of the queen. The poet's hand 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 8 1 

seems to have faltered over the work ; he had no 
definite conception in his mind ; in any case it is not 
to be extracted from the play. Some of the scenes 
indeed where the queen is present are admirable. 
The reconciliation, for instance, between her and the 
king (Act I. 4. 320 — 340) exhibits wonderful delicacy 
and lightness of treatment. But at other times her 
connection with Mortimer is at the very least equi- 
vocal. It is to him that she appeals for help in the 
first instance, and all through, up to Act III. sc. 2, 
her position is doubtful. Still, when she leaves the 
king to sail for France, her words are, 

'Unnatural wars, where subjects brave their king, 
God end them once ! ' 

and yet in the next act she is herself intriguing against 
Edward, and for the rest of the play is definitely 
ranged against him, until in Act V. (2. 43 — 45) she 
hints at his death, just as in Richard II. Bolingbroke 
ambiguously suggests the murder of Richard. 

This is to my mind the only fault in the play. For 
the rest it is emphatically a powerful drama, with fine 
characterisation, a clear and continuous thread of 
interest running throughout, and a climax of incom- 
parable pathos. In the death scene of Edward the 
poet strikes the deepest note of tragedy. Those three 
simple lines. 

Tell Isabel, the queen, I looked not thus 
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France, 
And there unhorsed the Duke of Clermont, 

V. 6 



82 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

are a fine specimen of what Mr Ruskin calls pene- 
trative imagination. They reach to the very heart of 
things ; they remind one of Faustus' * o lente lente 
currite noctis equi ' — of Othello's — 

And say besides that in Aleppo once, 
"Where a maHgnant and a turban'd Turk 
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, 
I took by the throat the circumcised dog 
And smote him thus. 

In such cases by one simple sentence, by the half- 
conscious reminiscence, the poet brings into full 
relief the tragedy of the situation, pointing the pitiless 
contrast between the present and the past. And the 
whole scene in Edzvard 11. is on this level ; the 
dramatist never falters. The agony is short, sharp 
and concentrated, unspoilt by the dififuseness that 
mars the parallel scene in Richard II. It is like the 
death of the queen in Henry VIII. Putting aside 
Shakspere, where shall we find in our dramatic 
literature anything equal in point of pure pathos to 
Marlowe's work in the close of his tragedy .'' It is 
like the ' wild preternatural ' grief that hangs as a 
cloud over the terrible fourth act of the Duchess of 
Malfy, with its masquerade of madness and death. 

I began this essay by suggesting that Marlowe's 
merits had been rather over-estimated. Second 
thoughts are best; it seems to me almost impossible 
to exaggerate the importance of what he did. When 
Marlowe came before the world the stage was in a 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 83 

state of chaos. Playwrights had abundance of crude 
power and energy, but so far there was no channel 
into which this dramatic activity could flow. Men, to 
vary the metaphor, were still groping about in the 
dark ; what they did was at the best merely tentative, 
because no definitive form of drama existed. But 
with Marlowe came a steady stream of light that 
proclaimed the new order of things. And the presence 
of this new power in literature was soon felt ; there 
could be no resistance^ One after another he 
showered his benefits on the stage. He created the 
noblest vehicle of dramatic expression of which any 
language is capable ; he created a new dramatic 
form ; he created in Edzvard II. a new type of play ; 
he annihilated the classical drama, he annihilated the 
vernacular drama ; and in place of them he substituted 
something infinitely richer than men had ever dreamed 
of, something that appealed to all classes, that teemed 
with life and passion, that gathered into itself all the 

1 Nash, of course, as befitted the satirist of the day (vide Mr Bullen's 
Introduction)-, and Greene both bitterly attacked Marlowe (Dyce, Greene 
and Peek, p. 35). They thought, in Horatio's phrase, that he ' might have 
rhymed', damned his plays, and afterwards stole the metre of them, 
precisely as the manager purloined poor Dennis' 'thunder'. Later on 
we find Nash working with Marlow at Dido, or rather finishing the play 
(in more senses than one), and Greene, very probably, collaborating 
with him in The Contention and True Tragedy. As for Marlowe's plays 
their popularity steadily increased ; Tamburlaine became the typical 
stage hero, Barabas, the typical villain. Allusions to them occur con- 
tinually, e.g. in Peek's Farewell (p. 549 in Dyce's edition), in Alcazar, 
I. 1, \n Alphonsus (p. 242) etc.; cf. too, Heywood's prologue to the 
Jclo of Malta. Faustus even penetrated to South Germany. 

6—2 



\ 



84 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

intellectual power and vigour of the people, something, 
in a word, that could be — as the classical drama 
could not, as the vernacular drama could not — the 
supreme and final expression of all that men thought, 
and did, and suffered. He had, in fact, solved the 
problem with which we started. He had shown how 
the stage could be, and should be, in the very widest 
sense a national institution. 

And now what influence did this young poet 
exercise on his successor Shakspere ? What are their 
relative positions in the history of the English drama ? 

In the growth of every art there is a period of 
preliminary development ; full and final perfection is 
not reached all at once. The facts, the technical 
possibilities, so to speak, that form the science of the art, 
and that once revealed are the property of all, have to 
be explored, and usually this task of discovery falls to 
the share of inferior craftsmen. Talent does its work, 
it accumulates the required knowledge, and then 
genius comes and inherits the labours of its humbler 
predecessor. And so it was with the Elizabethan 
drama, with this difference, that the chief of Shakspere's 
forerunners, the writer who next to Shakspere himself 
did more than any one else for the stage, was himself 
a man of supreme power. The drama, the very crude 
drama of the morality writers, of Greene, of Kydd, 
passed through the alembic of his genius, and it shone 
with a thousand fresh lights. It was transfigured, 
transformed, and when the work fell from Marlowe's 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 85 

hands Shakspere took up the task and carried it 
through to a superb completion. At one time critics 
read Shakspere and Shakspere alone, and they fell into 
the very natural error of assigning to him honour 
which belonged by right to his friend and rival ; for 
Shakspere's obligations to Marlowe in at least two 
points were enormous, and what these were it is not 
very difficult to see. Coleridge says, ' Shakspere's 
blank verse is an absolutely new creation ' ; a large 
portion of this essay has been devoted to an attempt 
to show that blank verse, as we understand it, as 
Shakspere understood it, came into birth at the 
bidding of Christopher Marlowe. This, then, is one of 
our points ;' Shakspere's treatment of the historical/ 
drama is the other. In both matters his debt to Mar- 
lowe was, I think, very great. To take the question 
of blank verse. The history of Shakspere's use 
of this metre is the history of his slow emancipation 
from the bonds of rhyme. It is useless to speculate 
on what he might have done had not Marlowe led the 
way and introduced blank verse on the stage. Shak- 
spere might have developed the verse for himself, or 
he might have gone on in the path which dramatists 
had long been treading and given us a rhymed 
Hamlet. In the same way he might but for Marlowe 
have thrown in his fortunes with the classical school ; 
he might have observed all the unities, anticipated 
' exact Racine,' and won the praise of Voltaire. The 
what-might-have-beens of literature are not a profit- 



86 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

able study — ' such things are vain.' An ounce of 
fact is worth a ton of conjecture, and it is enough to 
know that, as a mere matter of history, Shakspere did 
not write tragedies of the Gorboduc type, but did carry 
on to its utmost Hmits the romantic and historical 
drama initiated by Christopher Marlowe : likewise it is 
enough to know that Marlowe was the recognised 
leader of the blank verse school, while Shakspere for 
a time at least did not abandon the old rhymed 
couplet. Fortunately it is a matter of statistics, all 
duly set forth in Mr Fleay's Shakespeare Manual, 
where (p. 135) we may see the number of rhymed 
lines and of blank verse lines in the early comedies 
(which ought surely to include the Two Gentlemen of 
Verona), in the histories up to Henry V. and in the 
first tragedy, Romeo and Jnliet. 

A cursory glance at Mr Fleay's tables demonstrates 
one thing, that the proportion of rhyme in Shakspere's 
earlier plays is remarkably large : Shakspere had 
obviously not adopted the theories of his rival. At 
the same time is it not a somewhat extreme state- 
ment of the case to say, as Mr Fleay does, that 
Shakspere definitely 'joined the advocates of rhyme 
at first ' ? I should have thought rather that the poet 
was uncertain of his ground, that he was halting 
between the two schools, that in fact he had not yet 
' found himself.' 

The quantity of rhyme in the early plays is very 
great, but still they are not definitely written in rhyme. 



SHAKSPERKS EARLIER STYLE. 8/ 

Blank verse exercised already a strong influence on 
the poet, and what is really instructive to observe is 
not so much the quantity as the quality of the scenes 
in rhyme. Let us look for a moment at some of these 
dramas in detail. The First Part of Henry VI. is 
clearly not to be assigned wholly to Shakspere ; on 
the contrary he wrote, as far as we can judge on the 
evidence of style, only a very small part of what has 
come down to us as i Henry VI. His critics, however, 
agree in attributing to him at least one scene in the 
play, ii. 4, the plucking of the roses in the Temple 
Gardens\ and I think that, as Mr Swinburne suggests, 
Shakspere was responsible for the noble parting of 
Talbot and his son, Act iv. 5. Now the first of these 
scenes is in blank verse, the second in rhyme, and it 
cannot be said that either metre definitely wins the 
day. The poet seems to give each a fair chance, and 
the combatants come off equal. So much then for 
the earliest specimen of Shakspere's historical drama ; 
let us take now the comedies. Midsiumner NigJifs 
Dream can be dismissed at once ; no argum.ent can 
be based on the fact that it contains a strong pro- 
portion of rhyme. The rhyme is appropriate : artistic 
fitness justifies its use, whether or no Shakspere 
designedly employed it to obtain certain definite 
effects, which indeed was probably the case. Doubt- 

1 Of course, if, as Mr Fleay suggests, Shakespeare Manual, p. 31, 
this scene was written, 'late, c. 1596', then the argument in the text 
goes for nothing. 



88 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

less Titania, after proclaiming herself to be a ' spirit 
of no common rate,' would in Fairyland, as in the 
play, have proceeded to state her passion for Bottom 
in dainty rhymed couplets. The Comedy of Errors 
and Loves Labour Lost are more to the point. In the 
first rhyme decidedly holds its own ; 380 lines in a 
short play of 1770 lines represents a strong infusion 
of the metre ultimately abandoned by Shakspere 
altogether. And yet even in this fantastic, farcical 
piece, the poet when he would strike a deep note of 
pathos has recourse to blank verse ; he can give us 
lines like these, which, but for the regularity of 
rhythm, might come out of one of the latest plays. 

Not know my voice ! O time's extremity 

Hast thou so cracked, and splitted my poor tongue 

In seven short years, that here my only son 

Knows not my feeble key of untuned cares ? 

Though now this grained face of mine be hid 

In sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow, 

And all the conduits of my blood froze up. 

Yet hath my night of life some memory. 

My wasting lamps some fading glimmer left. 

My dull deaf ears a little use to hear: 

All these old likenesses — I cannot err — 

Tell me thou art my son Antipholus. 

This passage seems to me to show that even thus 
early Shakspere's instinct was guiding him towards 
the right path ; it proves that at least in moments of 
, real passion he appreciated the infinite superiority of 
blank verse as a means of expressing deep moral 
earnestness. And the same is true of Loves Labour 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 89 

Lost. The infusion of rhyme is very strong, nearly 
two rhymed lines to every one of blank verse ; but 
incomparably the noblest passage in the play, the 
great speech of Berowne in Act iii. (3. 289 — 365) is 
throughout in blank verse, with only one pair of 
rhymes (297, 98) ; the poet even forbears to end the 
speech with the usual jingling couplet. It would be 
unsafe to found any argument on Henry VI., 11.^ and 
///., but passing on to Romeo and Juliet, of which 
the first draft was written, perhaps, somewhere about 
1 59 1, we find that although rhyme, especially alter- 
nate rhyme, still holds its ground, yet the ' quality of 
the scenes chiefly written in blank verse is far higher 
than that of the rhyming passages.' The quotation 
is from Professor Dowden, and no one would readily 
dissent from the opinion expressed in it. To think 
of Romeo and Juliet'^ is to think primarily of the two 
scenes that are the crown of the poet's lyrical tragedy; 
they are of course the garden scene, ii. 2, and the 
balcony scene, iii. 5. Both are in blank verse of 
wonderful fluency and sweetness. Looking therefore 
a^ these five plays — at the three comedies, at the 
historical play, and at his earliest tragedy, I do not 
think we are justified in saying that Shakspere defi- 
nitely represented the school opposed to Marlowe. 
It would I believe be nearer the truth to suppose that 
he perceived here ' a divided duty,' that instinct was 

1 Cf. however, Fleay, Shakespeare Manual, 32, 33. 
^ Cf. Swinburne, Study of Shakespeare, p. 35. 



90 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

leading him towards adoption of the metre from 
which Marlowe, be it noted, had never swerved, 
while tradition and conservatism kept him faithful in 
a measure to the old system. There are two other 
important plays on the list, Richard III. and Richard 
II. 

After reading the criticisms of various writers — 
and still more — after reading the plays themselves, I 
cannot doubt that Richard III. is the earlier work. 
The two dramas raise one of the questions, where the 
metrical test conflicts with the aesthetic. But in such 
cases the internal evidence of style and treatment 
cannot be neglected ; some special explanation of the 
metrical peculiarity must, if possible, be sought for, 
and the principle can be applied here. In all respects 
but one, Richard II is a far finer play than Richard 
III The latter, however, is written in blank verse ; 
the former contains much rhyme. But there is a 
special reason why blank verse should preponderate 
in RicJiard III. In that play Shakspere was writing 
altogether on the lines of Marlowe ; his treatment of 
the subject, apart from the metre, strongly reflects 
the influence of his friend. In all probability they 
had been working together at the revision of Henry 
VI., Parts II. and III., and it is clearly to that group, 
dealing with the fortunes of the House of York, that 
Richard III. belongs. Shakspere in contributing his 
share to Parts II. and III. had been guided by Mar- 
lowe's example, and we may fairly assume that in 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 9 1 

rounding off the series he would keep to the method 
employed in the first two dramas of what is really a 
trilogy of plays. 

In the same way it is not unnatural to suppose 
that in writing Richard II. Shakspere, being removed 
from the immediate influence of his friend who had 
died in 1593, would at times slip back into the old 
channel. And even in Richard II. his instinct is true 
as ever. The superb speech of Gaunt (ii. i. 31 — 68), 
is not profaned by the jingle of any rhyme ; the 
vigorous speeches of York in the same scene are 
equally rhymeless (163 — 185 and 186 — 208) ; similarly 
the great soliloquy of Richard in the fifth act is all 
in blank verse, and generally throughout the play the 
poet rarely in the best parts falls back into rhyme. 
It is in the first scene where, like the eagle in Horace, 
he is getting ready for a flight, that rhyme runs riot, 
and again in the fifth act, scene 3, where it makes 
desperate struggles to hold its ground. For the rest 
the poet can write vigorous and varied blank verse, 
until in King John rhyme has perceptibly decreased 
to 150 lines in a total of 2403 ; afterwards it steadily 
declined, as Mr Fleay's table shows, until in the 
Tempest there are but two rhymed lines, in the 
Winter's Tale, not one. At times, of course, Shak- 
spere employed it even in his greatest plays, but 
always for some special object. In Othello for in- 
stance, as Professor Dowden points out, in Act iii. 2. 
210 — 220, the bitterness of Brabantio's reply to the 



92 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

Duke's frigid commonplaces is immeasurably height- 
ened by the rhymed parody of the cold comfort 
offered to him, 'the vacant chaff well-meant for 
grain;' and other iiistances might be quoted. 

This blank verse question is obviously one of 
great importance, and if I might summarise my 
impressions I should say that the credit of having 
created blank verse belongs not to Shakspere — 
assuredly not to Norton and Sackville, but absolutely 
to Christopher Marlowe — that there were when 
Shakspere came up to London as a playwright two 
dramatic schools, engaged in a fierce struggle over 
the question of rhymed or unrhymed compositions — 
that Marlowe, the author of blank verse, was the 
recognized leader of the blank verse party, while 
Greene perhaps was his most-distinguished opponent 
on the other side — that Shakspere did not definitely 
join either school, but preserved for a time an am- 
biguous attitude, poetic instinct leading him to adopt 
blank verse as the most natural vehicle of dramatic 
expression, while tradition, inexperience and perhaps 
personal sympathies made him adhere to the old 
rhymed system — that in his earlier plays we can trace 
the struggle of these two motives, the more serious 
and reflective parts of his work being written as a rule 
in blank verse, the higher and less earnest in rhyme — 
that somewhere about the time of the composition of 
the original draft of his first tragedy Romeo and 
Juliet, where the quality of the scenes in blank verse 



SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 93 

is markedly superior to the general level of the scenes 
in rhyme, he became associated with Marlowe in the 
revision of the earlier sketches of Henry VI., Parts 
II. and III. — that while still working under the in- 
fluence of Marlowe's style he produced Richard III., 
in which blank verse is for the time triumphant — that 
after the death of Marlowe he wrote Richard II., and 
in the scenes which on general aesthetic grounds must 
be placed on a lower level than the body of the work, 
relapsed into the old groove, — that the ground lost in 
RicJiard II. was quickly recovered in King John, and 
the battle finally, won in the Trilogy of Henry IV. 
Parts n. and TTl. (1597), and Henry V. (1599), in 
favour of blank verse. Whether, if Marlowe had not 
preceded Shakspere the latter would have attained 
to his perfect mastery over blank verse, or would only 
partially have developed the resources of the metre, 
or, again, would never have broken the fetters of 
rhyme at all — these are questions which it is useless 
to ask, because impossible to answer. We need not 
waste time in theorising on a subject where the most 
" exquisite reason " must of necessity be purely sub- 
jective, and therefore valueless. There is only the 
one bare fact, that with the force of Marlowe's ex- 
ample to influence him, Shakspere for some time was 
at least unwilling to give up the familiar rhyme ; from 
this each will deduce his own conclusions. 

I said that there was one other point in which 
Shakspere was strongly affected by the work of his 



94 MARLOIVE'S INFLUENCE ON 

predecessor. This was Marlowe's treatment of the 
historical play. The connection between the drama 
of Shakspere and the drama of Marlowe is best seen 
in RicJiard III. and Richard II. No argument can 
be based on Henry III., Part I. It is quite certain 
that that is a composite work, in which Marlowe and, 
probably, Peele had the principal shares, while Shak- 
spere added one or two scenes in the subsequent 
revision of the piece. In the same way we can put 
Henry VI. Parts li. and III. on one side, as being 
of disputed authorship. The first two historical 
plays of Shakspere that we can feel any certainty 
in discussing are Richard I 11.^ and Richard II.; 
each was written on a model furnished by Mar- 
lowe. RicJiard III. approximates to the peculiar 
type of drama represented by Tanibnrlaine, the 
Jew of Malta and Faustns ; in Richard II. we have 
a continuation of the legitimate historical play 
first seen in Edzvard II. In other words, these 
two plays correspond to the radical differences of 
dramatic construction that divide the earlier and the 
later styles of Marlowe. Richard III. is a one 
character play ; the main interest of the piece turns 
on the central figure of Richard. We follow him 
from scene to scene, as slowly but surely, consumed 

1 It is possible that Richard III. may, as Mr Fleay thinks, represent 
Shakspere's revision of an older play by Peele, a suggestion made by 
Coleridge, Lectures, p. 27. We are justified, however, in assuming that 
the character of Richard himself is absolutely the work of Shakspere 
alone. 



SHAK'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 95 

by pent-up fiery energy, he works his way Hke some 
pitiless personification of destiny to the final goal. 
The rest of the play only hangs together so far as it 
is all dominated by this one overshadowing power. 
Some of the characters are finely drawn, especially 
the queen-mother, Margaret, the prophetess of evil 
and despair in the piece, but we instinctively feel 
that the drarhatist only created them to be the victims 
of Richard's far-reaching, resistless ambition. If we 
might employ a very homely metaphor, we should 
compare them to ninepins set up for Richard to 
knock down. * But the structure of the play is far 
superior to that of any of Marlowe's pieces, Edward 
IT. alone excepted. The minor characters in Tain- 
hurlaine are mere ciphers, part, as it were, of the 
dramatic machinery; the minor characters in Richard 
III. serve as foils. Each constitutes his tiny contrast 
to the cruel power that crushes them one and all, as 
man may crush the flies that light on his hand. And 
this central figure is supremely impressive in its unre- 
deemed, self-avowed villany. Richard is the incarna- 
tion of cynical heartlessness ; he is morally colour- 
blind ; he sees — not good, but possibilities of evil in 
everything. lago is a villain, 'the most perfect evil- 
doer, the most potent demi-devil,' but even in lago 
the voice of conscience, or of what passes with him as 
such, can make itself heard. He puts himself to the 
trouble of spinning elaborate sophistries for his own 
self-deception, and when his scruples are particularly 



96 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

persistent falls back on the idea that he has been 
wronged, a thought which gnaws at his heart like 
' a poisonous mineral.' He lashes himself into a fury 
of counterfeit passion, and in what Coleridge finely 
calls 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity' 
casts about for excuses, for self-justifications which he 
almost manages to believe in. lago in short cannot 
look unblenching into the hell that he is preparing 
with infinite care for others — and for himself Richard 
is lago without the saving clause. The first scene of 
the play flashes the light into his black, self-centred 
heart. ' I am determined to prove a villain ' is his 
boast, and he is as good as his word. He has infinite 
powers of deception, and he takes an intelligible 
pleasure in contemplating these powers ; but he knows 
all the same that there is just one person against 
whom they can avail nothing, and that person is him- 
self Self-deception for such a man would be useless, 
and wisely enough he never attempts it. Richard, in 
fact, is rather like Mr Stevenson's friend Mr Hyde ; 
he is all bad, the heir of all the ages of the House of 
York, in the sense that he has inherited all the evils 
of his line. Years of sin and civil war have produced 
that ' foul indigested lump,' and yet by a freak of 
nature, or rather by the perfect fairness of Shakspere, 
Richard possesses the greatest intellectual powers, 
and thus our loathing of him is heightened tenfold. 
He is the only character in Shakspere in whom the 
moral element is non-existent, and this conception of 



SHAJ^SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 97 

flawless, self-conscious, self-confessed villany is essen- 
tially Marlowesque. Aaron in Titus Andronicus'^ , 
Barabas in the Jew of Malta, and Richard III. are 
characters conceived and worked out on the same 
principled The first two enumerate with complacent 
cynicism their crimes in the past ; Richard, his crimes 
past, present and to come. 

I am determined to prove a villain 
And hate the idle pleasures of these days; 
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, 
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams, 
I've set my brother Clarence and the King 
In deadly hate the one against the other. 

We are reminded too of Marlowe in another point. 
There is little evolution in Richard's character ; he is 
practically the same throughout. As a rule character- i 
development is one of Shakspere's great merits; his • 
men and women seldom pass from the stage at the 
end what they were when the curtain rose. They 
change, and rightly, as the course of the drama pro- 
ceeds : the Macbeth who drives with Banquo across 
the heath is not the Macbeth who will never fear ' till 
Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.' It is rare that we 
have a character who springs Pallas-like from the 
brain of its creator fully equipped, fully developed ; 
and Richard is one of the few. This was quite in 

^ It is, I suppose, fairly safe to assume that Tittis Andronicus is in 
great part the work of Marlowe. 

^ Cf. Titus Andronicus, IV. i. 98 — 120; 124 — 144, Jrw of Malta, 11. 
3. 177 — 202; 203 — 215, and Edward II., v. 4. 30 — 8. 



9^ MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

Marlowe's manner. Marlowe did not care very much 
about the finer shades of character-drawing; the 
subtler nuances that came readily enough to the 
delicate touch of Shakspere stood outside the range 
of his power. His heroes move upon the scene 
splendid, impressive, and after they have fretted their 
hour on the stage we can trace no material difference 
in them ; as some one has expressed it, they are 
counters stamped at the outset. Thus Marlowe might 
have drawn Richard III.; Richard II. he could never 
have achieved, just as even in RicJiard III. the terrible 
irony that runs throughout the play, lending to the 
simplest scenes the most weird intensity of meaning, 
would have been equally beyond his reach. Another 
peculiarity in Shakspere's tragedy that points pretty 
clearly to the influence of Marlowe is the wild, passion- 
ate, melodramatic energy that marks some of the 
incidents, reminding us of the Titanic vigour, the 
truculence almost of Tambicrlaine. The action of the 
piece is too violent, the whirl of passion too over- 
whelming. The effects, too, are crude, rock-hewn. The 
dramatist is not careful to mould the forms with 
minute delicacy; he trusts to the general impressive- 
ness of the figures. In his great plays Shakspere never 
neglects the details ; all is chiselled with consummate 
skill ; the work leaves his hands flawless to the most 
critical eye. But RicJiard III., like Marlowe's earlier 
works, produces its effect — and what a supreme effect 
it is ! — by the sense of superhuman power and force- 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 99 

fulness that it breathes ; we must stand at a distance, 
where the eye can take in the full impression of the 
bold masterly outlines. Of minor matters, the figure 
of the Queen Mother is precisely such a character as 
Marlowe might have drawn, had he possessed any 
faculty at all for realizing strongly the passions of a 
woman's heart, while the death scene of Clarence is 
clearly a reminiscence of Ediuard II., Act v. 5. 
Shakspere may too have had in his mind's eye the 
murder of Guise, Massacre at Paris, Scene xxi. Cf. 
also Henry VI, Part III. Act v. 6. 

\^ Richard III. was modelled on Marlowe's earlier 
style, Richard II. is a continuation of the later method 
adopted in Edzuard II. I endeavoured in speaking 
of the latter to show that it is the first specimen of 
genuine historical drama our literature possesses. Up 
to the production of Edward II., there had been 
chronicle plays, but no proper dramatization of 
history, pageants loosely strung together, but never 
an animated organic whole. A true historical drama, 
like any other play, must be wrought round some 
definite idea — unity of purpose must inform the 
various parts. The playwright has abundance of 
material from w^hich to choose, but in selecting his 
incidents he bears in mind their applicability to the 
development of his plot. He admits nothing super- 
fluous. Each scene must be a link in the chain. And 
so with the characters. Complexity of motive is 
essential to the action of a piece, and in each case the 

7—2 



lOO MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

motives of the dramatis personse must be patent and 
adequate. The historical play, in other words, only 
differs from the ordinary drama in that the poet 
drawing on history takes the actual events as the 
framework of his story, and fills in the rest with such 
dramatic details as his imagination suggests. This 
Marlowe had done in Edward II., and henceforth the 
historical drama proceeded on the lines laid down in 
that play. If Edward II. marked a decided advance 
on the construction of Tainburlaine, RicJiard II. was, 
I think, no less superior in general conception and 
effectiveness to Ridiard III. We no longer have the 
concentration of interest, the singleness of motive that 
made the latter turn from first to last on the one 
figure which dominated the scene; Richard II. is more 
complex, penetrated altogether with a finer dramatic 
spirit. Primarily indeed our gaze is riveted on the 
king himself, the man of brilliant phrases who can do 
nothing; v/e follow him from scene to scene, somewhat 
pitiful, as Mr Swinburne says, but not pitiable, and by 
the sheer force of his suffering our sympathy is wrung 
from us. But Richard does not stand alone ; there 
are other characters in the piece in whose motives and 
action the dramatist strives to interest us. Whether he 
succeeds, whether York, Aumerle and Mowbray are 
as tangible, as life-like as the parallel dramatis per- 
sonse in Marlowe's plays is another question ; Mr Swin- 
burne thinks they are not. 'They are shifting,' he says 
'fitful, vaporous, their outlines change, withdraw, dis- 



SHAA'SPERKS EARLIER STYLE. lOI 

solve... they cannot "hold this visible shape" in which 
the poet presents them even long enough to leave a 
distinct image, a decisive impression for better or for 
worse, on the mind's eye of the most simple and open- 
hearted reader.' 

For myself, I do not think any serious exception 
can be taken to this criticism; Mortimer to my mind is 
a far more solid and vivid creation than any of the 
subsidiary characters, York perhaps alone excepted, 
who gather about Richard. We need not, however, 
institute any elaborate comparisons between the two 
plays; it is enough to have noted the points of con- 
nection between them, above all to have emphasized 
the importance of Marlowe's work as marking an 
immense advance in the direction of the true historical 
drama. 

To estimate exactly the obligations of one writer 
to another is always a difficult, if not altogether im- 
possible, task: the second comer enters upon the 
inheritance, the literary capital, so to speak, that the 
efforts of his predecessor have amassed, and we must 
rest content with showing what this inheritance was. 
If Marlowe had never lived, would Shakspere have 
written as he did .'' who can say.'' As I have already 
remarked, we can only assume that Marlowe's intro- 
duction of blank verse on the stage rendered the use 
of that metre much easier for Shakspere; in the same 
way, we can only assume that Marlowe's having led 
the way with Edivard II. made it much less difficult 



102 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 

for Shakspere to write Richard II., and the historical 
plays that followed, than would have been the case 
had the works of Greene, and Peele, and Kydd been 
his sole guide what to avoid and what to aim at. To 
show what Marlowe did, and what previous dramatists 
(save the mark) had not done, is here, I think, as 
always, the best commentary on Shakspere's debt to 
him. That the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty 
in Edward II. suggested the main idea oi Richard II. 
anyone who read the two dramas could see for himself 
without requiring to possess the critical sagacity of a 
Charles Lamb : whether the second version is an im- 
provement on the first is likewise a question that each 
reader will decide on his own account. / There is just 
one scene in Richard II that Marlowe, I believe, could 
never have conceived ; it is the scene in the Duke of 
York's garden. \There is nothing in Edzvardll parallel 
to this exquisite interlude. Shakspere gives us here an 
instance of the happy tact that stooping to small 
things lends such convincing individuality to his plays, 
bringing home to us the terrible truth of what he 
describes. We have a similar instance of this fine 
felicity in the introduction of the old servant in the 
last act, with the homely talk that follows. By such 
prosaic touches the full force of what is passing 
on the stage is borne in upon us. We stand with the 
queen and listen to the gardener, and when at last 
she cries out the break in the silence comes as a 
positive relief to our tension. And the same effect is 



SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. IO3 

produced by the entrance of the groom just after 
Richard's soliloquy. It helps us more than anything 
else to realize the position of the king; the terrible 
blending of the tragic and the commonplace is the 
realism of life, and it is all part of Shakspere's unfail- 
ing sensibility, of that indefinable quality which made 
him write — to borrow Wordsworth's phrase — 'with his 
eye on his object,' a quality of which Marlowe was 
singularly devoid. On the other hand, if Marlowe 
could not have hit on the garden scene, assuredly he 
would never have been guilty of 'the jigging veins of 
rhyming mother wits' that disfigure the intolerable 
scene in Act v. — 'Speak it in French, king, say "par- 
donne moi"' — in all Marlowe's work there is no line 
like this. 

And now my 'occupation's gone,' and only one 
more question suggests itself — is a peroration essential.-' 
Perhaps, seeing how many eloquent passages in the 
"Ercles vein' have been written on Marlowe, we can 
dispense with one. It was long before his merits 
were recognised, but time has done him justice, and 
no history of the English drama would be complete, 
or definitive, that did not assign'to him the first place 
in the crowd of pre-Shaksperian dramatists. For us 
the works of Marlowe have a double interest, histori- 
cally, because they are incomparably superior to any- 
thing that had gone before; intrinsically, because they 
contain a wealth of poetry the most splendid, the most 
imperishable. 



APPENDIX. 

Among the plays assigned to Shakspere there are four 
of which it is practically certain that Marlowe was a part 
author; they are, of course, Henry VI., i., ii. and in., 
and Titus Androniciis. How far each of these dramas is 
the work of Shakspere, and how far the crude originals 
have survived in them, we cannot say : there is only the 
internal evidence to guide us, and that everybody naturally 
interprets his own way. But though on points of style differ- 
ences of opinion may exist, peculiarities of diction, out- 
of-the-way words, odd turns of expression, a-n-a.^ Xeyoixeva in 
short— and of such there is no lack in these four plays — 
cannot be explained away ; consequently they should I 
imagine, be allowed to constitute a tiny link in the chain of 
evidence. If, for instance, from Shakspere's authentic 
works not one undoubted use of the curious phrase ' to this 
gear ' can be quoted, if the expression occurs repeatedly in 
Marlowe's plays, and if, as is the case, we find the word in 
Henry VI. and Tifns Andronicus in passages where the 
general style and atmosphere is Marlowesque, the coinci- 
dence surely must cast its atom of weight in favour of any 
theory that would assign the passages in question to the 
author of Tamburlaine. Individually such points may be of 
infinitesimal importance ; collectively they are not so con- 
temptible. Every writer has his vocabulary, and having 
once used a word he is likely to employ it again. Now in 



APPENDIX. 105 

Titus Andronicus, as Mr Fleay points out, there are 204 
non-Shaksperian words ; in the same way in the three parts 
of Henry VI. I have marked a good number of unusual 
words and pecuHar phrases, the more important of which it 
seemed worth while to bring together, noting too some of the 
more marked parallelisms in style between passages in these 
three plays and passages in Marlowe's undoubted works. 

With regard to Parts 11. and in., accepting to a certain 
extent (for want of something better) the theory advanced 
in the New Shakspere Society's Proceedings by Miss Lee, 
I have referred very frequently, under the abbreviations 
C, and TT, to the two plays. The Contention and The True 
Tragedy. By ' non-Shaksperian ' I mean that the word is 
not found in any of the undoubted plays, my authority in 
each case being Schmidt's invaluable Lexicon. As bearing 
somewhat on the authorship of Parts 11. and iii. it' may 
not be amiss to note the great number of classical references 
in the two plays ; we repeatedly light on allusions and even 
quotations that strongly suggest the hand of the young 
(Nash would have added 'idiote') 'art-master' fresh from 
the University. Here are some chance references, many of 
the lines having no equivalent in the parallel passages in The 
Contention and True Tragedy. 

Part II. Act i. 4, 20 — not in C ; same scene, line 65 — not in C ; 
iii. 2, 92, and ri6 — 19; iv. i, 99 and 116 — not in C, and 135 — 137 ; v. 
I, 26 — not in C, and 100 (where the simile is taken from Propertius, 
Elegies ii. i, 63); v. 2, 59 — not in C, and 62. 

Part III. Act i. 3, 47 — not in TT; ii. i, 51 — 53; ii. 2, 146 — 148 — 
not in TT ; ii. 3, 53; ii. 5, 120; ii. 6, 12; iii. 2, 188 — 190 — not in TT; 
iv. 2, 19 — 21 — not in TT; iv. 8, 24; v. 6, 21 — 22. 

As for the random notes that follow, some of the coinci- 
dences have been previously pointed out ; some, perhaps, not. 



I06 APPENDIX. 



Henry VI. Part I. 
Act Scene Line 

i I I — 5 Obviously Marlowesque; cf. //. Tambiirlaine, 

V. 3, I — 7. Cf. Coleridge, Lectures, p. 272. 

,, „ 149 cf. //. Tamhirlaiiie, iv. 4, 42. 

,, „ 177 'stern' (=helm). Cf. //. Henry VI. iii. 2, 91 

(where not in C): elsewhere only in Pe7-i- 
cles iv. 1 . 64 (by Shakspere ?) ; Marlowe, Dido, 
iii. r, 108; V. I, 61. 

,, 2 95 'buckle with'; cf. iv. 4, 5; V. 3, 28,//. ^i?«ry F7. 

i. 4, 50. Non-Shaksperian, cf Dido i. 2, 19. 

„ 4 100 'gathered head' — of troops, cf. //. Henry VI, 

iv. 5, 10 ; Titus Atidroniciis iv. 4, 64. Non- 
Shaksperian ; Edward II. ii, 2, 121; Mas- 
sacre at Paris xi. 27. 

,, 5 12 'high-minded'. Non-Shaksperian, cf. Edward 

II. i. I, 149. 

ii 3 21 cf. /. Taniburlaitte ii. 1,9 and line 29. 

iv I 184 'decipher' ( = detect): cf. Tittis Androniciis iv, 

2, 8. 
V 3 76 — 77 cf. Titus Andronicus ii. i, 82 — 83. Richard 

III. i. 2, 228. Sonnet 41. 

,, 4 87 'reflex': verb non-Shaksperian, cf. /. Tambiir- 

laine \\\. I, 52; iv. 4, 2; V. I, 70. 

,, ,, 121 Obviously by Marlowe. 

,,5 9 'fruition'; non-Shaksperian, cf. /. Tamburlaine 

ii. 7, 29. 

,, ,, 108 cf. Edward II. v. 4, 65 — 66; Massacre at Paris 

xi. 45. 

Henry VI. Part II. 

i I 24 cf. Version of Margaret's speech in C with Dido 

iv. 4, 116. 
,, ,, 249 cf. Massac7-e at Paris ii. 47 ; cf. the speech here 

and in C with Guise's great soliloquy. 
n 3 54 'run a tilt'; non-Shaksperian, cf. /. Henry VI. 

iii. 2, 51 ; Edward II. v. 5, 66; not in C. 
„ „ 83 cf. Edward II. i. 4, 407; not in C. 

„ ,, 86 'baseborn'; non-Shaksperian, cf. iv. 8,49; ///. 

Henry VI. ii. 2, 143, occurs repeatedly in 



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